Pareto’s rule

The most common way to prioritize business tasks

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Written by Pavel
Updated over a week ago

Product managers need special methods and techniques for determining priorities and getting great business results. There are dozens of popular methodologies from gaming to the most complicated, quantitative and qualitative, for internal and external purposes.

Here’s one of the popular methods - Pareto’s rule.

20/80 Pareto’s rule

The most common and easy way to prioritize your issues is applying Pareto approach. The author of this model (Vilfredo Pareto) discovered that in almost every area we can see that around 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. You may also apply this principle to your business.

According to this scenario, you have to find and work on the 20% of features that will impact the 80% of the desired outcome.

  • Define which elements of your product would lead to the highest customer satisfaction (or other business goals) and simplify your list. 

  • Get rid of features that are not crucial and focus on the high-level execution of the main areas.

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