Romain Brabant Think of it this way. Not all features are urgent. If 5 features are likely to have similar impact and similar effort, which one do you implement first? You’re now going to start adding urgency to each of these 5 features. Maybe Feature 1 can help you acquire new customers quickly so maybe you should develop Feature 1 first. Maybe Feature 5 will help increase expansion revenues from existing customers but maybe this can wait for a month or so. Note that both Feature 1 and Feature 5 will have the same impact on your revenues but you’ve decided that adding more customers to your business is more important today than increasing expansion revenue even though the net impact of both features is the same. Therefore, Urgency then is a qualitative call you’re taking to push some items back and bring some items forward.

Think of another scenario. Let’s say you have a new feature that will have the greatest of impact but it will take time to develop. Nobody has explicitly asked for this feature. Majority of your customers instead have been asking you for X, Y and Z as that solves some of their immediate problems. If you don’t implement X, Y and Z it will likely lead to unhappy customers. So maybe the impactful feature can wait for a bit while you implement X, Y and Z?

What if you had 10 disruptive ideas with the same impact and the same effort. Which one do you implement first? :)