Prioritization Frameworks, and When Do They Work Better

Over the years in product management, I've come to recognize the true significance of one skill — prioritization.

It's an art that product managers must master to ensure a product's success: guiding the product development cycle, and determining what features make it to the users, and when. Considering diverse customer needs, fierce competition, and limited resources, effective prioritization is the key to unlocking true value.

In my search for effective prioritization methods, several frameworks have proven to be useful. Each of them offers unique perspectives and approaches to prioritizing features and tasks. These frameworks, however, shine in different scenarios, and understanding when to use which framework is just as important as understanding the frameworks themselves. Let's figure this out together.

The RICE Scoring Model

The name of this model is from an acronym for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Therefore, the core of the RICE scoring model consists of four components:

• Reach: This factor refers to the number of users or customers impacted by a task or feature within a given period. Reach is an important determinant of a task's value as it quantifies the breadth of its potential impact.

  
  

• Impact: it assesses the degree of change a task or feature will have on an individual user's experience or the business. The larger the positive change a task can bring, the higher its impact score.

  
  

• Confidence: this is a measure of certainty about your estimates. It's natural to have varying degrees of confidence about different tasks, especially when dealing with assumptions or forecasts. The higher your confidence in the reach, impact, and effort estimates, the higher the confidence score.

  
  

• Effort: Effort estimates the total amount of work a task will require from all team members to complete. This typically includes design, development, testing, and other associated costs. Tasks that require less effort get a higher score.

The RICE scoring model is particularly useful in situations that demand a data-driven, balanced approach to decision-making. It considers both the potential benefits of a task (Reach and Impact) and the resources required to execute it (Effort), while keeping the certainty of estimates in check (Confidence). This view allows product managers to avoid the common pitfall of prioritizing tasks based on intuition or bias.

Using the RICE scoring model effectively involves regularly updating the scores as new information emerges and reassessing the priorities accordingly. It encourages transparency and open discussion, as all team members can understand the reasoning behind prioritization decisions.

The ICE Scoring Model

This is a simplified version of the RICE framework for making easier decisions. Here, ICE is an acronym for Impact, Confidence, and Ease. Again, this method allows product managers to assess and rank tasks by considering their overall impact and ease of implementation.

Here's what each component of the ICE Scoring Model represents:

This is a slightly changed variation of the previous model. Again, we’re assessing several factors.

• Impact: this refers to the potential effect of a task or feature on your product, business, or users.

  
  

• Confidence: like before, this is all about how sure you are about your impact and ease estimates.

  
  

• Effort: this measures how easy or difficult it is to implement the task.

  
  

  Using the ICE Scoring Model is fairly straightforward. You give each task a score from 1 to 10 for each component — impact, confidence, and ease. Then, you calculate the ICE score by finding the average of these three scores. Tasks are then ranked based on their ICE score, and then you put those with higher score first in you to-do list.

  
  

The ICE Scoring Model comes into its own when you're grappling with tasks where the reach isn't a primary concern or is hard to estimate. It helps you zero in on the tasks that can make the biggest impact and are relatively easy to implement, enabling a focused approach towards resource allocation.

The MoSCoW Method

This method comes from the world of software development and project management, but it has since found its home in the toolkits of product managers. Yet again, it is an acronym that represents four categories of tasks: Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have.

• Must have: these are the non-negotiables, the essential elements without which the product simply cannot function or launch.

  
  

• Should have: tasks falling under this category are important but not critical for the initial launch or operation. If neglected, “Should have” tasks might cause inconvenience or impair some functionalities, but the product remains usable.

  
  

• Could have: these tasks are nice-to-have features or elements. They enhance the user experience or add value but aren't fundamental to the product's basic operation. They are often first candidates for scope cuts if time or resources become tight.

  
  

• Won't have: the final category is often overlooked, yet crucial. It outlines the tasks or features that will not be implemented in the current phase of the project. Identifying “Won't have” items provides clarity, sets expectations right, and ensures you can focus on more important tasks.

  
  

The MoSCoW method is beneficial in situations where decisions are driven by expertise and intuition, in scenarios with limited data but a strong internal perception of significance.

The Kano Model

Understanding and predicting customer satisfaction is beyond important in product management. Here, the Kano Model can help you. Named after its creator, Noriaki Kano, it provides a structured way to categorize features based on their potential impact on customer satisfaction. It includes five classifications: “Must-be”, “One-Dimensional”, “Attractive”, “Indifferent”, and “Reverse”.

• Must-be Features: these are basic expectations that customers have, even if they don't expressly state them. They are so fundamental to the product that their absence would cause great dissatisfaction. However, just having these features doesn't lead to increased satisfaction since customers view these as a given.

  
  

• One-Dimensional Features: these are the features that linearly impact customer satisfaction. The better these features perform, the higher the satisfaction, and vice versa. Customers often explicitly express their needs for such features.

  
  

• Attractive Features: these are the lovely extras, the features customers didn't know they wanted until they saw them. They can significantly enhance customer satisfaction, but their absence doesn't cause frustration since customers aren't expecting them.

  
  

• Indifferent Features: these are features towards which customers are neutral. Their presence or absence doesn't significantly impact customer satisfaction. Identifying such features is crucial to avoid investing resources in areas that won't bring you substantial returns.

  
  

• Reverse Features: these are features that can lead to dissatisfaction when present. Although, different customer segments may react oppositely to the same feature, making it attractive for some and a reverse feature for others.

  
  

Applying the Kano Model involves continuous customer feedback and market research. As customer preferences and market trends evolve, so too will the categorization of features within the model.

The Weighted Scoring Model in Product Management

In product management, decision-making often requires balancing multiple criteria at once. The Weighted Scoring Model can help you navigate this process. It gives you a systematic approach to evaluating tasks against various criteria, each weighted according to its relative importance.

The model operates on a simple principle: not all criteria are created equal. Each criterion is assigned a weight reflecting its importance in the decision-making process. Tasks are then scored against each one of them, and an overall score is calculated by summing the weighted scores. Then, the tasks are ranked based on these overall scores, with higher scores meaning higher priority.

Here's how the Weighted Scoring Model works in practice.

1. Start by identifying the criteria relevant to the decision at hand. These could include factors such as potential impact, strategic alignment, cost, risk, or anything else important to your specific context.
2. Assign a weight to each criterion to reflect its relative importance. The weights should add up to 100% (or 1 if you're using a decimal scale).
3. Score each task against each criterion on a scale (for example, 1–10). The scores should reflect how well the task fulfills the criterion.
4. Multiply the score of each task for each criterion by the weight of that criterion to get the weighted score.
5. Add up the weighted scores of each task to get the total score. Rank the tasks based on their total scores.

The Weighted Scoring Model is particularly useful when you're dealing with multiple factors that vary in importance. It allows you to make more nuanced decisions by considering all relevant criteria and their respective weights. It lowers the risk of overlooking key factors or giving unnecessary importance to others.

This method is particularly effective when there are many stakeholders involved in making a decision. It helps narrow down their opinions to an unbiased formula that determines the priority of the task.

The Buy a Feature Method

Product management is not a solo activity. It requires the involvement of various stakeholders, from team members to customers to senior executives. The Buy a Feature method makes use of their collective wisdom. It engages stakeholders by giving them “money” to invest in the features they think are the most important.

The method is quite straightforward: each feature or task is assigned a cost proportional to its complexity or effort needed for its implementation. Participants are then given an amount of virtual money and invited to “buy” the features they believe to be most valuable. The features with the biggest funding at the end of the exercise gain priority.

This approach promotes discussions among stakeholders as they negotiate and collaborate to fund their preferred features. The process can bring you valuable insights beyond just the rank of features. It exposes differing perspectives, unveils hidden assumptions, and surfaces previously unconsidered factors.

The Buy a Feature method is particularly effective in scenarios where stakeholder input is crucial. It's a powerful tool to understand what features matter most to your audience, be it customers, team members, or other interested parties. It can also serve as a platform to educate stakeholders about the complexities and trade-offs of product development, giving them a better understanding and appreciation of the process.

This method is suitable for startups with a few stakeholders, but as the company grows, it is usually replaced by other, more comprehensive approaches.

Story Mapping in Product Management

To release a great product, you need to understand the user's journey — something you can achieve using Story Mapping. This method involves arranging user stories — descriptions of tasks or features from their perspective — into a meaningful model to visualize the system's functionality, find gaps, and prioritize work.

Story Mapping arranges user stories into a two-dimensional matrix. The horizontal axis follows the person’s journey through the product, while the vertical axis represents the priority or complexity of the tasks. User stories are placed along these axes, creating a visual map that depicts how users interact with the product and which tasks are more critical or complex.

Story Mapping can be particularly useful when working with Agile methodologies and user-centric business models. In Agile, the focus is on delivering value incrementally and adapting to changes. The visual and flexible nature of Story Mapping fits this approach perfectly. It helps teams understand what value each increment should deliver and adapt the map as they learn more about the users and the product.

The Opportunity Scoring Model

The most successful products are those that solve genuine customer problems. But how do you understand which problems are worth addressing? That's when you use the Opportunity Scoring model. Designed to evaluate potential opportunities in the market, it focuses on two crucial factors: the prevalence of a problem and the customer's satisfaction with existing solutions.

The Opportunity Scoring model employs a two-dimensional approach:

Problem Prevalence: this dimension assesses how widespread a particular customer problem is. It quantifies the number of potential customers who can experience this issue.

Current Solution Satisfaction: this gives you an idea of how satisfied your customers are with the current solutions to their problem.

By plotting these two dimensions, the Opportunity Scoring model helps identify areas where a large number of customers are dissatisfied with current solutions — a potential sweet spot for product innovation.

The Cost of Delay Framework

As a rule, every delay can have a significant impact on a product's success, and the Cost of Delay framework helps you here. It takes into account the economic or financial impact of delaying the release of certain features or tasks. It's calculated by considering three main factors:

User Value: the benefit or value the user gets from the feature or project. Delaying could mean lost user satisfaction, usability, or even market share.

Time Criticality: the extent to which the value of the feature diminishes over time. For instance, a feature related to a seasonal event like a holiday promotion could lose most of its value if delayed.

Risk/Opportunity Cost: the potential lost opportunities or increased risks due to delay. This could include factors like competitor activity, market shifts, or compliance risks.

By assessing and quantifying these factors, the Cost of Delay framework provides a monetary value representing the cost incurred for each time unit of delay. This value can be used to compare and prioritize features or tasks, with those having a higher Cost of Delay being prioritized.

This framework is beneficial when economic or financial factors are crucial to the prioritization process. It highlights the features that should be fast-tracked to avoid significant costs and those where delays would be less impactful.

The real goal of prioritization is making well-informed decisions to deliver maximum value to your customers and your company. It's about choosing the most impactful tasks to work on and knowing when to work on them.

The frameworks we've talked about are tools to help you make those decisions. Each is useful in its own way, and using them wisely and effectively can greatly improve your product management process.

Though, prioritization isn't a one-and-done thing. It's a path that involves many decisions and learning experiences, often with multiple iterations. As you gain experience and knowledge in product management, you'll find these frameworks more and more useful. However, in product management, the journey is often just as rewarding as the destination. Safe travels!