We’ve all been there. You have different options, be it a new phone purchase, an activity from a brainstorm, or even an apartment purchase.
So you choose the option you feel it’s the best. And you always think “but what if I did that instead…”.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to have a completely objective answer about which option is the best for you?
The solution.
Welcome, Data–Driven Prioritization! It is a simple, effective and completely objective way to give some task a numeric priority based on common parameters, completely removing your feelings from the equation.
Which parameters you should use depend on your necessities and on the context of the options.
Step 1: Choose your parameters wisely!
Let’s pick for example an apartment purchase. You may be looking for your next apartment, but you’re not sure which one you should pick between 4 choices.
In this case, we can find at least 4 parameters:
- Convenience: This represent the economic convenience of the apartment (pricing, rent, maintenance, etc).
- Location: This represent where the apartment is located based on your necessities (is it near the store, the subway, a nice park, a noisy building, etc?).
- Interior quality: This represent the interior quality of the apartment (nice floor, big balconies, needs some works to the ceiling, etc.).
- Comfort: This represent the amount of commodities the apartment has (air conditioned, nice shower, double box, automatic elevator, etc.).
More parameters can be added at will, but those should cover the majority of the aspects of an apartment purchase process.
Step 2: Give them a score.
Next, you need to take these parameters and assign to each one of them a score from 1 to 10, 1 being the worst and 10 being the best. It’s not important how you evaluate each parameter, as long as you treat each parameter the same for every option. This is especially true for parameters that are not easily evaluable: in those cases you better have predefined values. For example, you may evaluate the “Comfort” parameter in this way:
- 1 if the apartment only has a shower.
- 2 if it also has one balcony.
- 3 if it has more than one balcony.
- 4 if it’s also air conditioned.
- 5 if it also has floor heating.
Step 3: Calculate the average.
Next and final step, you need to calculate the average of those parameters for each option. If you’ve been good with the evaluation, the one that has a higher average is the one you should objectively choose. It’s that simple.
A quick recap.
- Find as many common parameters for your options as you like.
- Give them a score and calculate the average.
- Profit!
When should I do that?
Every time you can! Even in marketing, especially in marketing. This is an approach we’ve been using in Growth Agents to prioritize marketing experiments for a while now. We’ve even developed a software to apply this approach, as well as many more scientific methods and frameworks, to our marketing decisions and planning. Feel free to check it out here!