I came across this awesome video from Ryan Singer via Mind the Product blog and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share it. It’s a neat method to categories a million items that comes up during product development. It talks about identifying and decoupling ‘orthogonal’ tasks. This means you find tasks that are independent of each other (doing or not doing task A doesn’t have a prevent you for doing task B) put them in separate bucket/category. If use find another task (say task C) needs to be done after task A then A and C belong to one bucket. By the end of this exercise you have a couple of different buckets (look at the image below) that are all independent of each other. Within each bucket though there are a sequence of tasks that are related together. The great think about this technique is that it helps you, as a Product Manager to be able to focus on the most important bucket on at a time and delegate another bucket to another group.
I loved how simple, short but super powerful this can be! Enjoy: