Planning and Prioritization

Read this when the team has more ideas than time or no way to rank them; it gives you the methods for choosing what to build and measuring it.

Planning is deciding, in order, three things: what could we build, what do we build first, and how will we know it worked. Each question has a well-worn set of methods, and most of them fit on an index card. This guide is the catalog. The exercises that apply them to your project live in the Creative and Planning activities.

Without deliberate planning:

• The team builds the first idea anyone said out loud, because nobody generated a second one.
• The backlog is ordered by who argued loudest, and the top item changes every stand-up.
• “Success” gets defined after the results are in, which is how honest people produce misleading work.
• The sprint note reports activity instead of progress, because nothing was ranked and nothing was measured.

None of the methods below is hard. The failure mode is not picking one.

What Is a Plan?

A Capstone plan is small. It contains:

• An option set: the ideas you considered, including the ones you rejected and why. This is the raw material for the RFC options section.
• A ranked backlog: every item of work in order, with a reason for its rank that a teammate can read without you in the room. This is what sprint planning pulls from.
• Two or three success metrics, each with a decision rule, a collection method, and a date. This is the core of your Definition of Shipped.

The three sections that follow give you a menu for each.

Ideation Techniques

Brainstorming works when the rules are enforced and fails when they are not. IDEO’s seven rules extend the four Alex Osborn published in 1953:

1. Defer judgment: no criticism of ideas during the session.
2. Encourage wild ideas: unrealistic ideas spark realistic ones.
3. Build on the ideas of others.
4. Stay focused on the topic.
5. Quantity over quality.
6. One conversation at a time.
7. Be visual: sketch, do not only describe.

Osborn’s original four are the first three plus quantity; the last three are IDEO’s additions for running the session well. The techniques below are structures that make the rules easier to keep. Pick one per session. If the team is remote, How to Brainstorm Remotely covers the logistics.

6-3-5 Brainwriting

Brainwriting is brainstorming on paper, in silence, so the loudest person does not set the agenda. The name is the recipe: 6 participants, 3 ideas, 5 minutes.

1. Each participant writes 3 ideas on the sheet in front of them within 5 minutes, building on what is already written.
2. Pass sheets one step around the circle.
3. Repeat for 6 rounds.

Six rounds of six people produces 108 ideas in half an hour. Adjust the numbers to your team size and keep the structure. This is the technique to reach for when one or two teammates dominate discussion.

Crazy 8s

Crazy 8s is a sketching sprint for interface or interaction ideas.

1. Fold a sheet of paper into eight sections.
2. Set an 8-minute timer.
3. Each participant sketches 8 different ideas, one per section, one minute each. A caption per sketch helps you explain it later.
4. Put every sheet on the wall and let everyone vote, for instance with stickers.

The one-minute limit is the point: it forces breadth before anyone falls in love with a single design. Crazy 8s works remotely with a shared whiteboard.

Rolestorming

Rolestorming has each participant generate ideas as someone else: the end user, the project partner’s boss, a competitor, the person who has to maintain the code in two years.

1. Assign a role to each participant.
2. Generate ideas from that role’s perspective.
3. Share and refine across perspectives, then rotate roles and repeat.

It shares a mechanism with Six Thinking Hats: stepping out of your own view surfaces the objections and wants you would otherwise miss. A longer treatment covers variants.

Reverse Brainstorming

Reverse brainstorming asks how to cause the problem, or make it worse, then flips each answer.

1. State the problem.
2. List every way to make it worse.
3. Reverse each item into a candidate solution.
4. Refine the flipped list into actions.

It is the fastest way to find failure modes for a risk register, and it is usually more fun than the forward version.

Brainstorming IdeasRun one of these techniques on your project and keep the shortlist.

Prioritization Methods

Every method below answers the same question, “what first”, with a different pair of axes. Pick the pair that matches the argument your team keeps having. Do not run three methods on the same backlog; the disagreements between them will eat the time you saved.

MoSCoW

Sort each item into one of four buckets:

• M (Must have): the project fails without it.
• S (Should have): important, and can slip if it has to.
• C (Could have): adds value, cut first when time runs short.
• W (Won’t have): out of scope for now, and written down so nobody re-proposes it next sprint.

MoSCoW is the fastest method and the easiest to game: if more than a third of the backlog is a Must, the sort has not happened yet.

Impact-Effort Matrix

Place each item on two axes, the impact it has if done and the effort it costs to do. Four quadrants fall out:

1. High effort, high impact: major projects; plan them, then do them.
2. High effort, low impact: usually not worth doing.
3. Low effort, low impact: filler, for when you are blocked.
4. Low effort, high impact: quick wins, do these first.

quadrantChart
  title Impact-Effort Matrix
  x-axis Low Impact --> High Impact
  y-axis Low Effort --> High Effort
  quadrant-1 1 
  quadrant-2 2 
  quadrant-3 3 
  quadrant-4 4
  Major projects that require planning: [0.75, 0.75] radius: 0
  but are worth pursuing: [0.75, 0.70] radius: 0
  Usually not worth pursuing: [0.25, 0.75] radius: 0
  Low-priority tasks, tackle if time permits: [0.25, 0.25] radius: 0
  Quick wins that should be prioritized: [0.75, 0.25] radius: 0

Estimate effort per item before you plot, or the matrix becomes a vote on enthusiasm.

Eisenhower Matrix

The same shape with urgency and importance as the axes. It ranks tasks better than features:

1. Important and urgent: do it now.
2. Important, not urgent: schedule it.
3. Not important, not urgent: drop it.
4. Not important, urgent: delegate it if you can.

quadrantChart
  title Eisenhower Matrix
  x-axis Not Urgent --> Urgent
  y-axis Not Important --> Important
  quadrant-1 1 
  quadrant-2 2 
  quadrant-3 3 
  quadrant-4 4
  Do these tasks immediately: [0.75, 0.75] radius: 0
  Schedule these tasks for later: [0.25, 0.75] radius: 0
  Consider eliminating these tasks: [0.25, 0.25] radius: 0
  Delegate these tasks if possible: [0.75, 0.25] radius: 0

The trap is quadrant 2. Design work, tests, and documentation are important and never urgent, which is why they get displaced by whatever is due Friday.

Cost-Value Matrix

Cost on one axis (in Capstone, almost always time) and the value delivered on the other:

1. High value, high cost: invest if the term allows.
2. High value, low cost: quick wins, first.
3. Low value, low cost: if time permits.
4. Low value, high cost: avoid.

quadrantChart
  title Cost-Value Matrix
  x-axis Low Cost --> High Cost
  y-axis Low Value --> High Value
  quadrant-1 1 
  quadrant-2 2 
  quadrant-3 3 
  quadrant-4 4
  Worth investing in if resources allow: [0.75, 0.75] radius: 0
  Prioritize these quick wins: [0.25, 0.75] radius: 0
  Consider doing if time permits: [0.25, 0.25] radius: 0
  Generally avoid or minimize these tasks: [0.75, 0.25] radius: 0

Cost-value is impact-effort with the value axis defined by your project partner rather than by the team. Use it when the two disagree.

Scrum Backlog Ordering

Scrum does not prescribe a scoring method. It prescribes a single, ordered product backlog, owned by one person, from which each sprint pulls the top items. The ordering can use any matrix above; what Scrum adds is:

• One list, one owner. Priorities are not renegotiated in every meeting.
• Value first. The item that changes the most for the user goes to the top.
• Dependencies respected. An item is only ready when nothing above it blocks it. A backlog that lets you pull a task you cannot finish is not ordered yet.

Most Important Task (MIT)

A personal method, not a team one. Each morning name the single task that, if it were the only thing you finished today, would make the day worth it. Do it first. Everything else is a bonus. It is the cheapest defense against a day of Slack and ticket grooming that ends with no commit.

PrioritizationPick one method, apply it to your backlog, and produce the ranked list with a reason per rank.

Success-Metric Frameworks

A metric is a number plus a decision rule plus a collection method, committed before you look at the data. The frameworks below are for product and game teams, which have users to count. Research, FOSS, and consultancy teams measure different things; the Identify Success Metrics activity has a subsection for each.

The Product-Market Fit Question

Sean Ellis’s product-market fit survey asks users one question: “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” The answers are “Very disappointed”, “Somewhat disappointed”, and “Not disappointed”. If two in five users or more answer “Very disappointed”, the product has found its market. Below that, work on the product before working on growth. One question, one number, and it fits in a Google Form.

Pirate Metrics (AARRR)

Dave McClure’s AARRR framework follows a user through five stages, and each stage is a place the funnel can leak:

• Acquisition: how do people find the product?
• Activation: do they take the first meaningful action (sign up, install, complete a level)?
• Retention: do they come back?
• Referral: do they tell anyone?
• Revenue: will they pay?

For a Capstone project, activation and retention are the two that matter. Acquisition is mostly the landing page, and revenue is usually out of scope.

HEART

Google’s HEART framework measures user experience rather than the funnel:

• Happiness: satisfaction, from surveys or ratings.
• Engagement: how often and how deeply users interact.
• Adoption: how many new users start in a period.
• Retention: how many keep using it.
• Task success: completion rate, time on task, error rate for the core workflows.

Pick the one or two letters that describe your product’s job. A tool used once a quarter does not need an engagement metric; a game does not need task success.

Identify Success MetricsCommit two or three metrics with decision rules and a collection method, dated.

Best Practices for Planning

• Diverge before you converge. Run one ideation technique before the first prioritization pass, even if the answer seems obvious.
• Write the reason next to the rank. A backlog order without reasons gets re-litigated every sprint.
• Estimate effort before plotting a matrix, and estimate it in hours, not T-shirt sizes, for a nine-month project with a fixed end date.
• Cap the Must-haves. If a third of the backlog is essential, nothing is.
• Commit metrics with a date in the repository, then measure. Choosing the metric after seeing the results is the most common way to fool yourself.
• Name the instrument. A metric with no collection plan (analytics, database count, benchmark script, survey) is a wish.
• Re-rank after every project partner meeting, not at the start of every sprint. The backlog is a living document.

Some Truths About Planning

Let’s be honest.

• Most of these methods are the same 2x2 with different axis labels. The value is in the argument the team has while plotting, not in the quadrant an item lands in.
• A plan made in week 2 will be wrong by week 6. The point of planning is that you notice, because you wrote down what you expected.
• Quadrant 2 of the Eisenhower matrix is where design docs, tests, and documentation go to die. No method fixes that; only a working agreement does.
• Vanity metrics are seductive because they go up. Downloads, page views, and stars tell you nothing about whether anybody got value.
• The PMF question needs enough respondents to mean something. With eight users, one answer moves the result by twelve points. Report the count, not just the share.
• Brainstorming sessions produce mostly bad ideas. That is the design; the good ones only show up after the obvious ones are out of the way.
• Teams skip prioritization when everything feels urgent. That is exactly when it matters, because it is the only way to say no to something.

Planning and Prioritization in Industry and Academia

Product teams at companies like Atlassian, Spotify, and Intercom run some form of the impact-effort or cost-value plot every quarter, usually as a RICE score (reach, impact, confidence, effort) that adds a confidence term to the matrix. Amazon’s Working Backwards starts from the press release and FAQ, which is reverse brainstorming applied to a launch. Google’s HEART framework came out of its UX research team and is used alongside AARRR-style funnel dashboards in most consumer products. The PMF question is the standard growth-stage survey at venture-backed startups, and the two-in-five threshold is the number investors ask about.

In research, the equivalent of committing a metric with a date is pre-registration: stating the hypothesis, the primary measure, and the analysis plan before collecting data. Journals in psychology and medicine increasingly require it, and computational fields are adopting it through registered reports. The prioritization equivalent is the experiment plan: which runs first, which baselines, and what result would end the line of inquiry.

In open source, prioritization is public. Maintainers triage issues with labels (good first issue, help wanted, wontfix) that are MoSCoW by another name, and roadmaps are ranked backlogs anyone can read. Reading how a project you contribute to ranks its work tells you where your patch will land.