I’ve been deep in 2024 planning for the last few weeks. We have a lot of exciting ideas for next year, but we’re a small team, so we have to direct our resources where they drive the most impact. 

This is always a challenge when it comes to our product roadmap. We have to balance different (sometimes competing) visions for the product, encouraging the creativity and risk-taking that make great products but ensuring our small engineering team can get it all done. 

To prioritize, I use Gibson Biddle’s GEM framework. Gibson argues that every new product feature should map to one of the “big three” business priorities: growth, engagement, or monetization. 

Below, I’ll share how Gibson used this process to develop Netflix’s product roadmap, and an early look at how the features on our product roadmap are shaking out. 

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The GEM model for prioritizing new features

Step 1: Get aligned on your business goals

Many teams struggle because they’re not aligned on the order of these priorities: growth, engagement, and monetization. 

Maybe the product team wants to keep users returning to the app, but the CEO wants to demonstrate profitability. If this is the case, even if MAUs are skyrocketing, the CEO will wonder, “Why isn’t the team focused on paid features that we could upcharge for?” 

The first step in this framework is to get aligned, as a team, on your order of priority. This will evolve as your business changes and grows. We’ll look at Netflix as an example.

In 2005, Netflix was already growing 30% year-over-year, but needed to make the business profitable. Gibson and his team decided to prioritize monetization as their most important goal.

Netflix’s GEM Prioritization in 2005

Step 2: Choose a high-level metric for your product

Once you’ve aligned on your priorities, it’s time for your cross-functional team to decide on the metric you’ll use to track progress against your chosen strategy. The question here is: “Which metric is most important for us to move to build a better product?”

Since Netflix’s team was focused on monetization, they selected customer lifetime value as the metric they would measure. They continued to measure YoY member growth (growth) and monthly retention (engagement), but decided to prioritize features that would drive customer lifetime value.

Netflix’s GEM High-level Metrics in 2005

Step 3: Brainstorm features that ladder up to your high-level metric

Now it’s time to brainstorm. Make a list of possible features that ladder up to your business priority and your high-level metric. For Netflix, that meant projects that they believed would increase their customer lifetime value by bringing customers back to the platform. 

Business priority: Monetization 

High-level metric: Customer lifetime value

Possible features or tests:

• Lower-priced plans to substantially improve retention
• Advertising specifically to customers who fit a high-CLV profile
• Selling previously viewed DVDs to customers as an additional benefit 
• Simplified sign-up process to drive up one-month retention

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We just started planning our Q1 2024 technology roadmap at Section. As part of this, key stakeholders submitted feature requests. We tagged these as growth, engagement, or monetization features.

This is only the first (and sometimes easiest) step. We still need to align on how we’ll prioritize growth, engagement, and monetization next year. 

After that, we’ll need a way to prioritize all the growth features or all the engagement features. We’ll follow the rest of Gibson’s process over the next few weeks. 

If you’re doing the same, on your own or in his upcoming sprint, I’d love to hear from you. 

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