Investing and Prioritizing for Products without shouts – CSI method

In big companies and small companies, we are always brimming with many ideas but limited time or people to get work done. There are many ways to organize the work list and at many different granularities. A few years back we were in a product planning session with literally 1000+ items to consider. Yes, spreadsheets are great at handling the 1000+ items, but human brains were occupied with other details. Hence we needed a simpler solution.

We were a cloud/SaaS/platform group who had dozens of partners with their own prioritized ask list (sometimes same requirement appears in multiple different ways). We also had strategic aspirations to upshift our product and offering to enable new scenarios. Finally, not surprisingly, we also had a pile of infrastructure items that needed mending (aka technical debt). There were many frameworks we were familiar with that we could apply. Some of the frameworks were:

• Use Investment Themes – and not surprisingly we had a dozen themes (still too many)
• Listen to the loud voice – depending on who you spoke with the priorities can vary and we are likely to have unhappy partners
• Listen to our engineers – our engineers know best, right. So why not just do the infrastructure items
• Listen to the business – we care about making money and why not just keep doing more features and keep piling up more debt.
• Postpone our strategic goals – strategic is not near term, so why not compromise and ignore these.

No single approach is appropriate. We have to devise a new approach that can enable us to keep all parts in perspective and transparent. My approach was to use the CSI method where we allocated % of investment to each of the three buckets:

• C – Customer – investment for enabling new customers and engaging more with existing customers.
• S – Strategic – long term investments that can bring in non-linear wins in the future without compromising current customer needs.
• I – Infrastructure – organized effort to upkeep of base systems, tools, and practices to ensure we keep technical debt under control.

At each quarterly planning sessions (we had 6-month sessions initially), we will allocate a certain % for each bucket. Often it is a range. For example, in the first iteration our investment was roughly – 60-70% for C, 10-20% for S, and 10-30% for Infrastructure. Because we wanted to keep our customers happier and ensure infrastructure is stable before we go off to dreamland of strategic missions.

No single allocation model is perfect. It is important to know what the allocation model is and organize the planning items in these buckets. Occasionally some tie-breaking is required to assign an item to one of the buckets. As the team works with this method continuously, they build expertise and can handle planning exercise without tears or shouts!