Our issue prioritization template and pro tips
Lots of companies have faced the problem of issue prioritization, and we are no exception. Customers wanted new features, managers offered their ideas, and developers came up with their solutions. Our product backlog in Jira turned into an endless list of issues. The sprint planning meetings took hours and ended up with the sprint still not getting the most significant backlog issues.
So, a few years ago, we decided to create a Google Sheets spreadsheet to prioritize tasks and synch our remote team. We:
- Adopted a decision matrix analysis.
- Came up with criteria from the RICE score and AARRR.
- Integrated the spreadsheets with Jira using Automate.io (also tried Zapier).
🎁We wanted to share it, as you may also find it useful. We've left a few of our issues in the spreadsheet as an example. You can delete them when configuring the prioritization matrix.
All you need to do to customize it is:
- Rename the teams and criteria.
- Add the criteria's weight and description.
- Add Jira issue links.
- Set up the Total tab.
🤔You can add issues to the table manually—long and painful, but free. Or you can use Zapier integration. That' s only three simple steps.
- Jira↔Zapier Integration.
- Google Sheets↔Zapier Integration.
- Google Sheets Automation Set Up.
📍The full instruction and the template are here
🔢We evaluated the issues once a week. Friday was our synchronize&prioritize day. Each went to their team tab and assessed the tasks by the criteria. All scores are automatically calculated by the formula:
Total volume = Criterion 1Score 1 + Criterion 2Score 2 + Criterion N*Score N.
Issues with a high number of scores will be at the top of the list. In the team's opinion, they have the highest priority. We have determined that we can take no more than 20 issues to the future sprint, so we highlight that number in the weighted decision matrix.
😬At first, the Google Sheets spreadsheet seemed perfect, but after a while, we started having problems:
- Jira import was regularly crashing.
- Lots of duplicated or lost data rows.
- Spreadsheets were freezing when several people were evaluating at once.
- We even had a Google Sheets admin who was continually fixing the formulas. - And anyway, the team sometimes forgot to assign the scores.
After two months of suffering, we made our prioritization tool—Ducalis.
We used the service inside our remote team for more than a year and now decided to show it to the world.
🚀Ducalis works blazing fast, even if the whole team evaluates the issues at the same time.
Tell us in the comments about how you prioritize your features and issues. Do you have any problems with team synchronization?
