Low hanging fruit is a technique that's used pretty much by everyone when it comes to prioritization. And like we explored in an earlier video prioritization is essentially an investment decision, where you are trying to decide where you should invest your scarce resources to get the maximum value.
In this context, you could think of an x-y plane where on the x axis, you have the cost and on the y-axis, you have the potential value. If you were to look at this as a 2x2 grid, you have
low cost, low value items
low cost, high value items
high cost, low value items, and
high cost, high value items
When you take the phrase, low-hanging fruits, it consists of two parts. One is the low hanging and the other is the fruit. The low-hanging refers to the low effort that's involved and fruit refers to the potentially high value.
However, when people think about low-hanging fruits, intuitively they go for the low cost, low value items whereas you should really be going for The Ripe fruits, which are low cost, high value items.
Now the question becomes, what do you do after you address all the things you have in the low cost high value items.
Intuitively you would be tempted to go for the low cost, low value items. But an alternative approach that you must consider is to take the high cost, high value items and see if you can break it down in such a way that you get 80% of the value, but at 20% of the cost. Essentially find ways to structure them, as high value, low cost items.
If your teams need help with prioritisation, give me a shout!