Stack Ranking prioritization technique
The agile product backlog is a list of prioritized user stories, containing the descriptions of the wanted functionality desired in the product.
A healthy backlog typically includes stories at various levels of refinement. The top of the backlog includes ready stories, the most important ones, the ones that have a higher priority and have enough details so the team can start working on them immediately. On the other hand, the bottom of the backlog contains the in-refinement stories, the less important ones with an inferior prioritization level.
How can we prioritize user stories?
Last year I wrote about six of the most used prioritization techniques in software development:
Purpose Alignment: Helps people prioritize work based on purpose
RICE: Balanced but time-consuming method for mature products
Also wrote an article where I compared the above six prioritization methods.
Comparison Between Popular Prioritization Methods
Strange enough, I didn’t do an article about one of the most used methods by software companies nowadays: Stack Ranking also named Stacked Ranking.
Stack Ranking is a very simple technique, consider each user story and place it in order of priority.
Ranking them from the most important (top of the stack) to the least important (bottom of the stack).
Start with one, then two, then three, and continue to n, the total number of items in your backlog.
When doing the prioritization always consider the following:
Try to not repeat priority numbers and only have only one number one. By doing this you will avoid a common product pitfall where everything becomes a very high priority.
Prioritize each item, relative to all the other items. By doing this you’re always delivering the highest value you can, and your team is never working on low-value features.
Advantages?
Easy to use.
Disadvantages?
The priorities at some point may be determined using your intuition. In this scenario, we recommend taking into consideration the product data analytics you may have at your disposal, and the feedback received from the stakeholders.