Drive Focus With Priority Limit Lines

Add priority limit lines to prioritization pages.

July 18, 2023

Drive Focus With Priority Limit Lines

by Claire George

"What is in and what needs to wait?" This is an important question that every product manager has to address during roadmap planning. The simple truth is that the team cannot deliver everything, which means that you need to make the highest priorities clear. Today's update gives you a new way to visualize what you need to focus on first.

You can now add priority limit lines to prioritization pages in Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Ideas to group work by the level of importance.

Many of you love using prioritization pages to rank the relative importance of ideas, features, or epics. You can evaluate multiple items at once — quickly adjusting product value scores and the priority order as you go. But establishing a list of priorities does not mean that all of the work will actually get done. With today's enhancement, you can clearly set delivery expectations by showing what is in and what needs to wait.

Add as many priority limit lines as you need, customizing the labels to match your prioritization approach. For example, you could use just one line to show where the cut-off is for items to work on now. Or you could add multiple lines to show Must-have/Could-have/Should-have/Won't-have if you use the MoSCoW framework or Now/Next/Later to create a simple roadmap.

Set the position of the priority lines on the page. Then move work items up and down the list to determine the importance of each one. The number of items in each priority group always stays the same — creating a forcing factor to decide what matters most.

Let's take a deeper look at priority lines in practice:

Set clear delivery limits

Imagine you are prioritizing features for a strategic initiative. Below, we filtered the prioritization page to show the top features that support this theme of work. But it is unlikely the team will have capacity to deliver them all in the desired time frame. So we added priority lines to make it clear which ones are a must-have and which ones can wait.

Embed live prioritization pages into presentations and notes to align the team on what matters most.

Priority limit lines are one more way that you can keep your team focused on the highest-value work.

Building lovable products requires product managers make difficult trade-off decisions. We hope this new feature helps you go boldly with clear and decisive product strategy.

Sign up for a free trial of Aha! Roadmaps

Aha! Roadmaps is the best way to set strategy, prioritize features, and share visual plans. It includes Aha! Ideas Essentials for crowdsourcing feedback. If you are interested in an integrated product development approach, use Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Develop together. Sign up for a free 30-day trial or join a live demo to see why more than 700,000 product builders trust our software to build lovable products and be happy doing it.

Claire George

Claire George

Claire is passionate about helping product development teams set brilliant strategy and deliver results. She is the Director of Product Marketing at Aha! — the world’s #1 product development software. Claire has 20 years of marketing and software experience. Previously, she led product marketing at an agile-based work management platform.

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