Pirates are a tricky bunch and if there's one piece of advice I can give you, it's not to trust 'em! And I'm not referring to a computer whiz getting you bootleg copies of The High School Musical, I'm talking about good old, swashbuckling, patch wearing, peg-leg walking, parrot talking, shiver me timbers pirates.

Recognizing that their line of work, driven by greed and conquest, was an open invitation for chaos, pirates implemented rules, known as the Pirate Code, to keep emotions at bay and the ship in relative order. Unfortunately for the crew, most of these rules that included punishments ending with "as the Captain shall think fit" so it wasn't quite as democratic as the world we know today, but nonetheless, there was at least a semblance of order. 

While Blackbeard may be gone except for history books, those same emotions that risked the collapse of all of pirate culture still exist in us today and occasionally, we need to be protected from them. (Side note: For a fascinating exploration of how our capacity for emotions allowed to us to dominate the planet, check out this book).

As product managers making decisions on a daily basis, just because you were up all night taking care of your dog who is scared of thunderstorms, your kid got mud all over the inside of your car on the drive to school, you spilled your coffee on the way into work and consequently are in a bad mood doesn't mean you should prioritize things any differently today than any other day. But chances are, you will because we’re human, emotions are high and they crowd out those logical thoughts that we need for sound judgement. If this doesn’t affect you, you may be a robot.

Not helping our case, Recency bias (giving greater importance to more recent events or ideas) will also cloud that judgement, encouraging us to focus on features that have been top of mind recently than a more important feature that hasn't been talked about much in the last few weeks. Add to that a few dozen other biases that may be impacting our judgement at the same time and the odds are certainly stacked against us. By improving our self-awareness around these topics, we can at least make incrementally better decisions with the ultimate goal of reaching better outcomes for our teams and our products. To do that, we need our own Pirate Code to keep emotions at bay and our ship in relative order. 

The Product Manager's pirate code

The Product manager’s pirate code should be a set of rules to help us make better decisions, which is a concept that has been discussed at length using another, far more banal term, prioritization frameworks. Most people agree these are useful in principle, however in practice we find that most teams don't consistently use them for a couple reasons we'll explore later. 

My preferred prioritization framework (or Pirate code, which sounds much cooler) is the RICE method because it is easy to use, doesn't involve any complicated mathematical modeling formulas (which I contend are of dubious value) and balances both the costs as well as the benefits of building a particular feature. 

For a quick primer, RICE is an acronym standing for:

• Reach

  • How many users / customers will a feature impact in a given timeframe? You can use any value here but you get bonus points if this value comes from actual product metrics rather than a number you grabbed out of thin air!

• Impact

  • Of those people a feature will reach, what impact will it have on them? You can use any scale here as well. I like to use 1, 3 and 5 where 1 = minimal impact (they might not even notice), 3 = moderate impact (they'll notice but likely won't change any behavior) and 5 = major impact (they will adapt their behavior when they use the feature).

• Confidence

  • My favorite part of the RICE framework which factors in how confident we are about our knowledge of a feature. This is a combination of confidence in each of the other three values: Reach, Impact and Effort (complexity). I like to use a score out of 100 where 50 of those points are confidence from the PM team in the reach and impact. The other 50 points are confidence from the development team in the effort. Add those two together and you get a percentage.

• Effort

  • How much time will this take? Again you can use any value here, but person-weeks (how many weeks it would take a single person) or t-shirt sizes are common values which will depend on the time scale of the features you are prioritizing. 

And now for some simple math:

Example:

10 customers x 5 (major impact) x 0.8 (80% confidence) / 5 person-weeks effort = RICE score of 8

Then it's just a matter of picking the ones with the highest score right? Oh if only life was that easy🙂

When prioritization frameworks break down

What happens when your RICE scores don't match up with the "gut feel" priority you had in your head? There's yet another psychological force at play here, Cognitive dissonance (where our actions don’t match up with our beliefs), which is telling our brains that this ranking system can't POSSIBLY be right because it doesn't match with how we’ve already ranked these features in our heads. 

This is the largest reason teams don’t consistently use any given framework and they abandon their Pirate code. It doesn’t give them the answer they want and admitting that their gut feel prioritization may be incorrect is an insurmountable mental barrier.

For those who try to stick it out and follow the code to the letter of the law, I've seen people usually do one of two things at this point:

• Go back and change the numbers so things fall in the order you wanted them to initially

• Adding a "factor" multiplier which allows you to multiply the scores by some factor you determine for each item so they fall in the order you wanted them to initially

Either of these activities will destroy the utility of your prioritization framework. Avoid them at all costs! 

As hard as we try to objectively prioritize work for our teams and products, the world of enterprise product management does not behave according to a strict set of mathematical rules like it may for astrophysicists. There are always exceptions and there will certainly be times when strictly adhering to the numbers is a bad decision. So what then?

Where pirates got it right

For some inspiration, we can look to everybody's favorite pirate ship featured in Pirates of the Caribbean, the Black Pearl. Captain Barbossa of the Black Pearl hints that "the [pirate] code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules” and while the historical accuracy of this statement is perhaps a bit suspect, given that the entire story is made up, the principle can still apply!

Product managers use prioritization frameworks as an attempt to help steer us in the right direction, stay on course and mitigate the effects of all the forces (psychological and external) that are trying to sway us one way or the other. But these frameworks should be used as guidelines, not strict rules that must be followed to the letter. They are intended to help us make better decisions, knowing that we will never make perfect ones, and even an incremental improvement is of value. 

Whatever framework you choose to experiment with (and you can always try out a few to see what sticks), give yourself permission to deviate from the prioritization order it prescribes.

If you have a good reason to deviate, then deviate away! Document your decision so you can reflect on it later (mitigating some other memory-based biases here) and once you’ve gone through your prioritized list, it’s a good idea to take a step back and review. If we believe that this framework will help guide where we should be spending our time, then most of our efforts should be spent on items near the top of the list. If you find yourself deviating quite frequently or in a majority of cases, that’s a signal to zoom out and re-evaluate if something else is influencing your decisions.

When we just prioritize based on gut-feel, we miss out on this opportunity to reflect on what may be influencing how we make decisions. A framework is an excellent tool to give yourself some guidelines to aim for and should you deviate, ensure that you are doing so intentionally rather than unconsciously. Without a code of our own to keep us on track, we could end up unknowingly sailing off into the mist, right where the pirates are waiting for their next plunder!