Whenever I work together with clients in a scaled agile organization, prioritization across the borders of a team or even across large business units is perceived as most challenging by the participating Product Owners, Managers or Shareholders. One of the reasons for this perception is the fact that a common method for prioritization is often missing and thus urgently needed.
In this blog post I want to introduce to you the Magic Matrix Technique that my colleague Karl Bredemeyer and I designed for a large workshop a long time ago. With the Magic Matrix Technique you can prioritize cross-organizational projects and create a unique company backlog that lists all projects of a company in a discrete order. We have used this technique very often since then and it always proofed its value.
The technique is called Magic Matrix just because the client for whom we designed the workshop called it that way after the workshop was over. It is basically a good combination of the Magic Estimation game invented by Boris Gloger, the Prioritization Matrix invented by Donald Reinertsen, and some facilitation. This technique is very generic and can be used for almost every prioritization approach. That’s why some Product Owners I worked with use it to prioritize their user stories in their product backlog as well.
Table of Content
- Initial situation
- Operation
- If there are still projects on the wall
- Why it works like magic
- What happened then
- Additional information: Constraints to this technique
