Why Prioritize with AARRR

It is critical to analyze and understand users’ behavior. But presuming, you’ve gathered the data and decided on one or two metrics you need to increase. In what order will you implement the tasks from the backlog for better results?

Improving a metric requires commitment. You want to be sure every issue your team solves impacts it positively. And you want to impact it faster at the lowest cost. That’s when AARRR becomes your prioritization framework.

How to Prioritize with AARRR

What to do first for optimizing product growth funnel.

1. Transform AARRR steps into scoring criteria for Weighted Scoring Matrix.

2. Decide on criteria weights to focus on specific goals more. E.g. Retention is more important now.

3. Decide on the score scale. E.g. estimates in affected users or just scores from 1 to 5.

4. Add Effort Criterion with negative weight to consider development.

5. Prioritize all product related tasks with scores for all tasks by each AARRR step.

AARRR score = A(Score x Weight) + A(S x W) + R(S x W) + R(S x W) + R(S x W) - Effort (score x weight)

1. Transform Metrics ino Scorecard Criteria

Think of the metrics as questions a task or idea must answer to understand its influence.

E.g., How the solution increases the number of people:

• attracted to the website/app? (acquisition)

• registered/installed the app? (activation)

• using the product regularly? (retention)

• eager to tell others about the product? (referral)

• paying for the product? (revenue)

These generalized examples are great for a start. Specify the questions and descriptions later when you see these don’t fit. Don’t waste time trying to come up with ideal questions straight away.

2. Decide on Scope for Prioritization

AARRR is a marketing framework. We use it for prioritizing features as well. You can use it for both—divide the issues into scopes and clarify the criteria descriptions. We use two different boards to prioritize features and marketing activities. Each of them has a few adjusted AARRR criteria.

Feature Prioritization

For estimating stories and tasks, we use Activation, Retention, and Revenue with these descriptions:

• Activation—Solves onboarding problems; Customer gets the value faster; Helps to understand how it works.

• Retention—Helps to sustain usage frequency. The evaluation must be regular. Helps teams to evaluate on time. It’s important to remind users how many issues they need to evaluate.

• Revenue—Helps to sell. Easier to make a demo. Customers understand the value. Customers don’t want to buy without it.

We also have Reach, Effort, and two product-specific criteria—Speed and Collaboration.

Marketing Activities Prioritization

For estimating marketing efforts, we use two criteria from AARRR:

• Acquisition—How much traffic to the landing page expected?
  0—no traffic
  1—>100
  2—100-500
  3—500-1000 and higher

• Activation—How many conversions expected?
  0—no conversions
  1—a few
  2—about a dozen
  3—dozens and more

We also use the Effort, Price, and Analytics criteria.

3. Distribute Criteria Weights

AARRR metrics should be improved equally. You can’t spend all your time enhancing retention only. You’ll have nobody to retain because acquisition and activation weren’t working.

At the same time, you can’t allow a substantial decline in one of the metrics and may require precise concentration. Growth means constant zooming in and out.

So, AARRR criteria should be of equal value and have the same weights most of the time. And when some of them require more team investments, increase their weights. Thus, tasks influencing the needed metrics skyrocket to the top of priorities.

4. Add Effort Criteria

There is one vital point missing in AARRR—it doesn’t take into account costs. Increasing your key metrics is important, but you can’t afford to neglect the price. To grow faster, you want to find quick wins. Decide on effort criteria (e.g., development complexity or promotion cost) and add them with negative weight to highlight the cheapest and most valuable solutions.

5. Choose Scores

Decide on the numbers to use for estimation. Fibonacci or Exponential are great sequences to use. We use the 0—3 range. The numbers are not that important as how you explain them. Add score descriptions to facilitate the estimation. You’ll find geometric sequence in our AARRR template:

• 0 — No impact

• 1 — Minimal

• 2 — Low

• 4 — Medium

• 8 — High

You can also use the exact numbers as you saw in the description of Acquisition and Activation in the 2nd step.

→Try AARRR template for feature prioritization

→Try AARRR template for marketing prioritization

6. Evaluate Asynchronously

Involving your team enhances the prioritization greatly. Together you estimate more accurately and build team clarity.

• Divide the criteria among the teammates who are best at evaluating them. Collect all opinions, regardless of a newbie or an expert—their average score is the most accurate estimation you ever get.

• Estimate independently, out of the meeting room. Average estimation is precise when people don’t deliberate. Try to preserve unique visions. Don’t emulate each other’s thoughts—don’t discuss possible scores before you’ve assigned them.