Use this template to align your team around what’s most important as part of an epic, project, initiative or release.

Prerequisites:

• a good understanding of user needs, so that you can make informed decisions about what’s essential and what isn’t
• clear business objectives so that you can weigh these up against user needs during prioritization
• features clearly broken down into user stories or other similar ‘chunks’ so that they can be prioritized in a straightforward fashion

You can run this exercise synchronously or asynchronously, and with each feature, decide whether it is a:

• Must have: essential for the success of the initiative and needs to be in the first release
• Should have: essential but can wait until a subsequent release – you can think of these as ‘v1.1’ features
• Could have: nonessential but still valuable, and so should still be considered to be part of this project
• Won’t have: explicitly excluded – this is a great way to set expectations for what’s getting axed

Finally, it’s often helpful to bring a broader range of people into this exercise than you might have in sprint planning, for example, as it’s a great way to bring people on board with your thinking in a reasonably time-boxed way.