# The Rule of Thirds: A Follow-up on Heroku Postgres Team Planning

DevFeed: [The Rule of Thirds: A Follow-up on Heroku Postgres Team Planning](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-rule-of-thirds-followup-41150.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.craigkerstiens.com/2013/08/13/The-Rule-of-Thirds-followup/>)

Author: Map

Published: 2013-08-13T20:55:56Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Craig Kerstiens](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/craig-kerstiens.md>)

Topics: [Heroku Postgres](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/heroku-postgres.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data.md>), [Users](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/users.md>)

Tags: [customers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/customers.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data.md>), [discussion](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/discussion.md>), [heroku](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/heroku.md>), [heroku-postgres](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/heroku-postgres.md>), [teams](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/teams.md>)

## AI overview

This follow-up explains how the Heroku Postgres team uses the Rule of Thirds as an approximate prioritization exercise. It recommends gathering customer and market data, discussing that information informally, and collaboratively collecting and organizing feature ideas.

## Source excerpt

Several months back I wrote about how we do higher level, long term planning within the Heroku Postgres team. If you haven't read the previous article please start there. The exercise or rule of thirds is intended to be approximate prioritization and not a perfect science. Since that time I'm familiar with some teams both in and out of Heroku who have attempted this exercise with varying levels of success. We've now done this process 4 times within the team and after the most recent exercise attempted to take some time to internalize why its worked well, creating some more specifics about the process. Heres an attempt to provide even more clarity: Gather data ahead of time Its really common to have a list things to work on, but knowing the impact of those is commonly pure speculation. There may be some people that talk to customers, but even then its a subset of your actual customer base. Going into the exercise as much data you can have ahead of time on impact of features and specific problems helps. In our case we do this by: Surveying current customers and users Surveying attriters Engaging with customer facing teams to hear trends Input from external parties such as analysts on trends Allow for casual discussion We typically conduct our planning exercise at an offsite, this is a multi-day time of team bonding, planning, hacking. We intentionally schedule our planning excercise towards the end of the offsite. This allows us to have updates/presentations frmo the data we've gathered and from those that are customer facing. Presentations are meant to be short and direct, discussion can flow casually after. This gets a lot of people on the same page at a smaller level and reduces the problem of too many cooks in the kitchen come time for the actual exercise. The rule of thirds Creating the list Coming to the exercise itself... We begin by everyone writing a list of their ideas individually, this is meant to be a list of the features we want to place on the grid. At th