How to Make Product Prioritisation Fair, Fast, and Focused
- Chris Burgess
- Oct 13
- 5 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
Align your team and simplify product prioritisation with an inclusive framework that removes politics from decision-making
Every product leader knows this problem. Stakeholders have ideas but Engineering has limits. The roadmap is how plans are communicated, but it’s not rare for stakeholders to feel like their opinions and ideas are not reflected in what gets built.
Introducing the Stakeholder Marketplace. This methodology gives every stakeholder a real say in shaping what gets built, without the usual chaos or lobbying. It is structured, transparent, and fair. You can use it with internal teams or even with your most important customers.
For founders, this approach helps turn competing priorities into clear trade-offs. It gives your team a structured way to decide what to build next without slowing momentum or losing focus on customers.
The goal is simple: make trade-offs visible, give everyone a voice, and protect focus.
How It Works
The Stakeholder Marketplace is a 5 step exercise that you run at the start of each major planning cycle. It takes roughly half a day to run and replaces politics with clarity.
Step 1: Collect the Ideas
Invite stakeholders to submit their ideas via a standardised format.
Partner with Engineering to design a template that makes it easy to capture what the idea is, why it matters, and how much effort it might take. This helps stakeholders think clearly and ensures Engineering can roughly estimate effort.
Step 2: Estimate the Effort
Once all ideas are in, ask Engineering to assign a T-shirt size.
This sort of exercise is common practice in agile teams for roughly evaluating effort. Use simple T-shirt sizes: Small, Medium, Large, or Extra Large. You do not need precision, only relative effort.
Step 3: Assign a Cost
Convert each T-shirt size into a notional cost.
Each idea has a price, and every stakeholder receives a fixed budget to spend which creates the foundation for the marketplace.
Step 4: Run the Marketplace
Bring everyone together. Explain the rules, and give each person the same budget.
If everyone has the same budget it keeps things fair, but also transparent. It also can encourage people to pool their resources fostering teamwork.
Step 5: Share the Results
Share the outcomes with everyone impacted. List which ideas were funded, which were not.
This summary becomes part of your regular communication. It shows clearly where stakeholder input influenced the roadmap. You can share it internally and, if appropriate, with customers or partners.
How to Make It Work Smoothly
Running the Stakeholder Marketplace is straightforward, but like any collaborative exercise, success depends on the conditions you create around it.
A few small operational choices can make the difference between a process that feels empowering and one that feels forced.
Here’s 3 ways that will help you set it up for success:
Secure Engineering Buy-In First Bring Engineering in early. Explain that this framework exists to protect their time, not add bureaucracy. Once engineers see that it surfaces trade-offs and limits lobbying, they often become its biggest champions.
Be Clear About When or Whether It Will Run Agree how much Engineering time you will dedicate to stakeholder-led work, usually twenty to thirty percent. Making that capacity visible helps stakeholders make smarter trade-offs and keeps delivery realistic. You do not need to run the Marketplace every cycle. Do it only when Engineering has the capacity to deliver what is funded. If timing or priorities shift, communicate openly about why. Transparency about when and why builds more trust than rigid consistency.
Run the Process Smoothly Be transparent about the rules, timelines, and expectations before the session starts. Clarity prevents friction and helps everyone trust the process. Ask each requester to give a sixty-second pitch before budgets are allocated. Hearing every idea quickly builds context, sparks collaboration, and surfaces overlaps between teams. After pitching, give people space to think. Encourage them to combine budgets on shared priorities. This is where real alignment starts to form.
Finally, remember that Engineering will often refine each idea into what is realistically possible, and that might not always match the stakeholder’s original vision. Treat that as part of the learning loop, not a failure. Each time you run this exercise, your stakeholders learn to frame ideas more clearly and think more like product owners themselves.
This is how a tactical process becomes a strategic one. It teaches your team how to decide together, not just what to build next.
Why This Product Prioritization Approach Works
The Stakeholder Marketplace is not a gimmick or a game. It is a learning exercise in balancing ambition and capacity.
When people are given clear constraints and a fair process, they make better decisions. They start to see that prioritisation is not about saying no. It is about saying yes to the right things at the right time. This approach can actually speed up decisions. It replaces backchannel debates with one transparent, time-boxed exercise.
It doesn’t stop there - the benefits are significant because it:
replaces lobbying with logic.
makes trade-offs visible to everyone.
protects Engineering time.
creates fairness and transparency.
helps stakeholders appreciate focus.
earns Engineering respect for Product.
builds alignment instead of pressure.
forms a shared language around effort and impact.
Over time, this approach shifts conversations from opinions to trade-offs and from lobbying to learning. Once stakeholders see what something costs, they naturally focus on what truly matters.
Large ideas start to break into smaller, more fundable chunks. Prioritisation becomes an ongoing exercise in learning and collaboration.
Example: Prioritizing Customer Integrations
Imagine a 20-person SaaS company with a low-code platform planning its next quarter.
Several stakeholders propose new integrations and improvements:
The Head of Sales wants an AI chatbot to qualify leads
The Head of Services suggests a cloning feature to speed up client onboarding
The Head of Marketing wants self-service demo templates
The CEO proposes a HubSpot integration for deal tracking
The company’s biggest customer requests pre-built templates to reduce build time
Engineering sizes the work:
Chatbot: Medium (£50)
Cloning feature: Large (£100)
Templates: Large (£100)
The team allocates twenty five percent of capacity to stakeholder projects, equivalent to £150. Each of the five stakeholders gets a £30 budget.
During the session, Engineering points out dependencies. The chatbot benefits from HubSpot, and templates become smaller if cloning is done first.
Sales and the CEO pool their budgets for HubSpot. Services, Marketing, and the customer pool theirs for Cloning.
At the end, everyone can see how decisions were made, what was funded, and what was postponed. Stakeholders feel included. Teamwork prevails. Engineering capacity is respected. Product has a transparent record of prioritisation.
The Leadership Lesson
The Stakeholder Marketplace doesn't replace your roadmap or your final authority. It is a structured tool for making trade-offs visible and building trust in your decisions across the company. You still own the roadmap, but now everyone understands why.
The most powerful outcome is cultural: when stakeholders have a genuine say, they stop lobbying and start collaborating. Prioritisation ceases to be a negotiation and becomes a learning experience that builds alignment.
For product leaders and founders, the real win is the shift in organizational thinking. Stakeholders internalize the reality of development constraints. They learn that influence isn't about who shouts loudest; it's about who invests wisely.
And while the Marketplace gives everyone a voice, great product leadership still anchors decisions in customer and market insight. Stakeholder input shapes perspective, but discovery shapes direction. The Marketplace simply provides clarity on trade-offs while your product strategy remains anchored in what the market truly needs.
Over time, this mindset shift leads to sharper focus and healthier decision-making. If you want a simple, repeatable way to make prioritisation transparent and inclusive, try the Stakeholder Marketplace. You may be surprised how quickly clarity replaces conflict, because when everyone understands the trade-offs, alignment isn't forced, it's earned.
If you’re leading a startup or scaling product team and want to implement something like this, let’s talk. I help founders and product leaders design and run their first Stakeholder Marketplace sessions — practical, fast, and tailored to your team’s reality. Reach out at [info@crwburgess.com] to start turning prioritisation into alignment.
Comments