LoopedIn allows you to organize and prioritize your ideas using the foundations of the Effort Impact Matrix, which generates a Priority Score. When prioritizing each idea, you will find a priority scale of impact and effort.
What is the Impact Effort Matrix?
The Effort Impact Matrix is a simple yet powerful tool for having a group conversation to make clear what all your priorities should be. It’s an exercise you can do with your teams that’ll help you all work out what you should be working on. The matrix populates the following structure, where items that land in the top-left hand corner should the items you focus on next:
Impact & Effort
Before jumping into any prioritization, you should have a common understanding of what Impact and Effort mean to you and your team.
- Impact – What will the impact be for your customers? Is it going to have a large or small impact? Positive or negative? Surprise or expected? These are all things you should be considering.
- Effort – What resources are required to get make this idea a reality? Rarely should this just encompass "development" effort. What about QA? Marketing launches? Training?
Priority Scores
Each Idea can be prioritized either from the Quick Details modal or from the idea's main page. Each Idea has two sliders representing Impact and Effort. When combined together, Impact and Effort generate the Priority score:
Priority scores are an easy way to put a number against the Impact Effort Matrix outcome. Priority Score = Impact Score + Effort Score
Priority Scores can be any number between 2 to 10:
- 10 means that it has the highest priority and maps to the top-left quadrant of the matrix
- 2 means that it has the lowest priority and maps to either the top-right or bottom-left quadrants of the matrix
Priority Score Mapping
| Priority Score | Quadrant |
|---|---|
2, 3, 4 | 😩 Time Sinks |
5, 6, 7 | 😕 Maybe |
8, 9, 10 | 🤩 Quick Wins |
The Quadrants
As seen in the above diagram, here's a breakdown of how to think about the quadrants and where to prioritise:
Low-Effort-High-Impact = Quick Wins (top left)
Here are the tasks and projects that have the biggest impact without much extra work. This is the quadrant you really want people to be spending time on. Where everybody wins.
High-Effort-High-Impact = Big Bets (top right)
These are the things you usually never get round to doing, because they’re too hard, and there’s so much noise and busyness in between. I suggest you should probably have only have a small number of things here, as they require recurrent focus and tend to require long-term effort.
Low-Effort-Low-Impact = Incremental (bottom left)
Some of this work is unavoidable, but they are the kinds of things you could do when you’re tired, or you might want to batch them, or you might want to push them into the darkest corner of the week if you can’t get rid of them.
High-Effort-Low-Impact = Time Sinks (bottom right)
As a group, and as an individual in that group, if you’re finding things in the High-Effort-Low-Impact sector, there’s a really important conversation to be had about whether you should stop doing this work at all, and what the consequences will be if you stop it. If you can stop them, it might free up the time to focus on the Low-Effort-High-Impact projects.
