Stack Ranking Your Objectives
Customer Problem Stack Ranking from Shreyas Doshi is a way out of the problem of working on problems that almost no one cares about.
You rank customer problems in a stack so that you know what is most important to solve. Otherwise you get sucked into a cycle of get product idea, do promising user research, launch product, find no takers, do more research, launch v2, and so on.
After every such cycle, you walk away a little more bemused yet confident that you’ve learned something. What you should learn is this:
💡‘Nothing in life is as important as it is while you’re thinking about it.’ This is something that Daniel Kahneman calls the ‘focusing illusion’ (link in comments)
💡The focusing illusion improves on the painkiller v vitamin v candy theory. It says in the thick of it even candy can seem like a painkiller. How?
By inducing tunnel vision. When something is in focus, you only see that and nothing else. Candy, candy, candy!
Stack ranking can get you out of this rut. Here’s where it gets exciting.
Like most good ideas, it travels well outside of the domain it was thought of. You can use the same principle to make better decisions for yourself.
👉When making a decision, list all objectives that mean anything to you. Scribble one each on a post-it.
👉Pick one that seems most important and another to battle it with.
👉Compare the two–which matters more?
👉Then pick up another post-it against the winning objective.
👉As you do, add weights–how far are you willing to go for an objective? You want a dog but not if your spouse is threatening to leave you because of it.
Once you’re through the stack ranking, you’ll have identified the most important thing.
But wait, you thought you didn’t need this ranking stuff, did you?
The focusing illusion affects us all. You’re no different from a shifty customer. You’ve the same problem. You don’t know what you want. You think you do, but catch you at a different time of the day and your wedding plans will have made an about turn.
It is a skill to know and name what you want. Once you’re clear on what’s important to you, it’s harder to be sidetracked by the false compass of peer pressure, changing trends, or anything that doesn’t sit right with your values.
As I said, stack-ranking travels well. Allow it to help you elsewhere as well: a boss who seems to not know what she wants, a choice between two jobs, or even whether to get a cat since the dog didn’t work out…
