Priority Sliders

What is it?

• A tool that facilitates conversations about relative priorities and focuses upcoming activities.
• A finite set of topics/dimensions/areas that can be relatively prioritised against each other.
• A slider for each dimension where groups of people collaborative slide the relative importance to the right (more important) or left (less important).
• A practice that increases the autonomy of teams (see decision making below)

Why use it?

• Enables an alignment and consensus on areas of focus.
• Provides clarifications across stakeholder groups of motivations and desires.
• Can be used as a filtering mechanism for later prioritisation (of, for example, product backlog items).
• Can be used for decision-making: the alternatives/options of specific decisions (features or product decisions in particular) can be evaluated in the context of each priority starting from the highest ranking priority. If all alternatives score the same on that highest priority aspect, the next in line is used. This provides an objective discriminating factor and allows the team to take a decision on their own using the Priority Sliders as a decision principle.

Example priorities

Here are some examples of priorities that could be considered. These are just a starting point, though - feel free to try other priorities to suit your team and project!

• Functional completeness
• Test completeness
• Product-market fit
• User experience
• Performance
• Stability
• Security
• Learning

Further Information

• Trade-off Sliders in Atassian Playbook
• Try out an online example from Red Hat. You can add your own topics or choose from the examples.