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A quad chart for plotting items by relative importance and difficulty
Use this design thinking framework to prioritize items quickly so that you can take action faster.
Force-ranking impact and difficulty separately helps facilitate deliberation and resolve differing opinions, helping your team develop a plan of action.
The importance/difficulty template helps you:
- Quickly prioritize tasks and take action
- Understand the relative difficulty of tasks
- Get broad team alignment on action items
How to use the importance/difficulty template
To get the most out of the importance/difficulty template, follow the below steps.
1. Assemble 10-15 tasks or ideas that you’re looking to prioritize with your team
This matrix is ideal for a batch of ideas, tasks, or small projects in the range of 10-15 items, enabling your team to quickly assess each one based on their importance to your overall goals versus how difficult they are to accomplish.
2. Map each task according to its relative importance and difficulty
Use the framework to assign each task or idea to its corresponding level of importance and difficulty, across four quadrants: Quick wins (low difficulty, low impact), best bets (high impact, low difficulty), low priority (high difficulty, low impact), and moonshots (high difficulty, high impact).
Note: Avoid simply dropping tasks into the quadrants — make sure you debate and discuss the relative merits of each idea with your team, and carefully determine where it should land within the matrix.
Tips for running an importance/difficulty template exercise
To run a successful task prioritization exercise, you should:
- Narrow your focus to a range of tasks or ideas between 10-20 items, and time-box your discussions to keep the session moving
- Use features like tags for sticky notes and use comments to help capture individual feedback on tasks, and anonymous voting to help determine the best way to move forward
- Once you’ve assigned each task or idea to a quadrant, get aligned with your team on action items and delegate responsibilities
The Mural visual collaboration platform makes task prioritization transparent and simple
Sticky notes & text
Add ideas, action items, and more as a sticky note or text box — then change the colors and cluster to identify patterns and new solutions.
Real-time collaboration
Add more productivity and engagement to meetings and calls with features to guide collaboration.
Flexible permissions
Control access to collaboration features with view-only, edit, and facilitator settings.
Anonymous voting
Gain consensus and reach alignment quickly, either in real time or asynchronously.
Asynchronous collaboration
Innovate and collaborate effectively together without booking time on calendars.
Tags on sticky notes
Customizable labels make it easy to find, organize, and categorize your work in a mural.
What is an importance/difficulty matrix?
Why do you need an importance/difficulty matrix?
LUMA offers acclaimed in-person training, custom innovation programs, and a unique digital platform (LUMA Workplace), used by innovators in over 70 countries. Leading organizations around the globe rely on the LUMA System of Innovation — a practical, flexible, and scalable approach to Human-Centered Design.
