Strategy

Improvement Planning & Prioritization

This exercise, inspired by LUMA, helps teams prioritize improvements by assessing impact and effort. Evaluate user impact (severity on task completion and satisfaction) and implementation difficulty (technical complexity and resource needs) for each issue. Identify quick wins and major improvement projects to focus your efforts.

Duration
1 hour
Group Size
4-8
Category
Strategy
Difficulty
Easy
Participants will learn to apply a structured method for prioritizing improvements. They will understand how to balance user impact with implementation effort.
The team will create a prioritized improvement plan with clear action items and owners. Expect to leave with a focused list of fixes ready for action.
Most teams struggle to choose between improvement ideas. This exercise visualizes tradeoffs, creating a shared understanding. Scoring before clustering is a common mistake; solve multiple problems together. Don't weight everything equally; push for differentiation. Skipping commitment leads to inaction. To calibrate, identify anchor points before scoring. Define the biggest pain point (impact=3) and the simplest fix (effort=1). For remote teams, use digital whiteboards with voting. Discuss score outliers. Schedule a check-in to review progress; this works best as a regular cycle.

  1. Gather Your Issues (10 minutes): Spread out issues from research or retrospectives. Write each issue on a sticky note. Be specific (e.g., "users don't understand what happens after they click Submit").

  2. Cluster Related Issues (15 minutes): Group stickies with a shared root cause or potential joint solution. Name each cluster with a short, descriptive phrase (e.g., "Onboarding friction").

  3. Score for User Impact (10 minutes): For each cluster, estimate the improvement to the user experience if fixed. Use a scale: 3 = Major pain point, frequent; 2 = Moderate friction, occasional; 1 = Minor annoyance, edge case. Write the score on the cluster.

  4. Score for Effort (10 minutes): Assess implementation difficulty: 1 = Ship in a sprint; 2 = Requires 2-4 weeks of work; 3 = Major initiative. Write the score next to the impact score.

  5. Calculate Priority (5 minutes): Divide impact by effort (Impact/Effort). Higher numbers mean better ROI. A 3/1 is a quick win, while a 1/3 needs strong justification.

  6. Commit to Action (10 minutes): Choose 2-3 high-ratio items. Assign an owner and target date for the first action. Make these commitments visible.

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  • Sticky notes

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  • Timer

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