This prioritization framework is a tool that empowers an engineering team to determine the priority of feature development. It provides guidance when making tradeoffs due to competing priorities and work overload. The framework, with its prioritized themes and prioritization process, ensures that the team can effectively balance the work while addressing incoming requests.

Prioritized Themes

• Priority 1: Operational Excellence including on-call support and high-severity user-submitted tickets
• Priority 2: Company-Wide Strategic Initiatives
• Priority 3: Product Initiatives
• Priority 4: Engineering Excellence including team-level initiatives, technical debt, team-driven projects, team goals, and innovation focused efforts
• Priority 5: Support Requests including low-severity user-submitted tickets and external engineering initiatives from other teams and projects

Prioritization Process

• Company-wide initiatives, including security updates and support updates, should be addressed as long as there is no impact on product or engineering.
• The team will review priorities monthly.
• Team members are encouraged to spend ~8 hours of monthly development time on innovation including new development ideas, processes, and other related ideas.
• High priority operational tasks should always be prioritized first.
• To balance the effort between priorities, the team should use the below guideline for the average effort spent each sprint on prioritized tasks.

Target Effort Spent on Tasks

• Priority 1: 10% time spent on tasks unless when on-call increase to 20%
• Priority 2: 10% time spent on tasks
• Priority 3: 50% time spent on tasks unless when on-call decreases to 40%
• Priority 4: 20% time spent on tasks
• Priority 5: 10% time spent on tasks