Product development initiative prioritization : Making priority decisions more quantifiable in an agile organization

Abstract: An aspect that is of high importance for an organization in the IT industry related to product development, is the task of prioritization. This task have in many cases been handled through informal discussions without any type of quantitative method or scoring technique. This can become an issue since informal priority discussions is relying heavily on the individual expertise and experience. By complementing and assisting these in informal discussions with a scoring model, these decisions can become more transparent, easier to challenge for other stakeholder in the organization and ultimately more accurate. This thesis was therefore aimed to investigate potential prioritization techniques for a case company to implement into their current informal priority process. The company is a provider of a B2B Sportsbook platform that are experiencing this priority challenge. The performed study was initiated by a literature study and a set of preliminary interviews leading up to a semistructured interview study including 8 people with the position head of product development. These were performed with the intent to identify a suitable prioritization method based on this unique organizations requirements.  The collected and analysed data resulted in a proposed method that was evaluated further through feedback discussions, ultimately leading to a suggested prioritization approach.  The developed priority method is divided into three steps. In the first step, initiatives are categorized based on their current relevance. The initiatives of highest current relevance advances to step two. In step two these initiatives are listed in a table where they are scored based on a series of identified relevant parameters. These initiatives are then plotted in order to obtain a visual representation of all initiatives. In the interest of an even more thorough comparison between certain initiatives, there is a third step that compares initiatives in a more relative fashion.