Most companies use high/medium/low labels or employee voting, but these methods don't reflect market facts. Instead, we’ll use evidence and impact to create your prioritization ranking.
Pull up the “cards” you created with the Capturing the Problem Worksheet. For each card, add market evidence and impact. Use the Market Problems Table.
Evidence is the number of times you've seen the problem or the percentage of users experiencing it. This shows "pervasiveness."
Find this data from interviews, feature requests, surveys, etc.
Impact is a 1-5 value indicating how severe the problem is for users—a higher number means worse.
Design a scale that fits your situation. For example, a 5 could mean the problem affects your persona’s revenue, while a 2 affects their comfort. Each organization adapts a scale to suit their business.
Multiply evidence and impact to get a priority value.
Move this information to a spreadsheet for filtering and manipulation.
This approach gives you a market data-driven, organizationally-aligned list of problems to solve, avoiding emotional or political biases.
Next, you’ll bring the top five prioritized problems to your development team for discussion and sizing estimation. We’ll cover that here.