Blog 68: 5 popular product management prioritisation frameworks

Every idea has its merit. As a product manager, we are bound to receive new feature suggestions. They can come from any stakeholder — customers, CXOs, colleagues, developers etc.

Which features to include into our roadmap? Where should our resources spend time on? As there is always an opportunity cost. All this can get overwhelming. We need to prioritise.

There are several frameworks to help us with that. Let us look at five popular product management prioritisation frameworks. These frameworks are guidelines, and we can customise them based on our requirements. These frameworks also help us define our MVP and assist in our product-market fit journey (refer blog 51, on how to achieve product-market fit).

Value vs. Effort

What: This framework evaluates every suggestion/initiative based on its value and the efforts (including its complexity) required to implement it.

Initiatives that provide the highest value with the lowest effort could be the preferred choice. However, this decision cannot be taken in isolation. Our decisions must consider our vision, mission, and market dynamics etc.

Weighted scoring

What: This framework is an extension to the Value vs. Effort framework. We score each suggestion/initiative. Scoring and ranking each initiative removes the subjectivity in decision making. See a sample template below.

Kano model

What: This framework categorises features into broadly three segments, i.e. must-haves, performance, and delighters. Must-haves are the minimum expected features to solve customer pain points. Performance features are features that pleases the customers. Delighters are features that ‘wow’ customers as they go beyond expectations. Delighters differentiate us from the competition.

A healthy combination of features spanning across these three categories will increase customer satisfaction.

MoSCoW Method

What: This framework helps us to understand what’s important and what’s not. The name is an acronym of: Must-have; Should-have; Could-have; Won’t-have. Must-haves are non-negotiables and essential features. Should-have are high-priority features. Could-have are good to have features. Won’t-have does not mean they will never be included. It just means ‘not this time’.

RICE scoring

What: This framework helps prioritize items by scoring each according to four criteria: reach, impact, confidence, and effort. Add the reach, impact, and confidence scores. Then divide that cumulative score by effort score. To arrive at a single score for each item. This final score will help us compare, quantify, evaluate, and prioritise each item.

The higher this final score, the more we are closer to high value and low efforts.

Reach: Indicates, how many customers will be impacted per month (or any time-period) by this feature?

Impact: What kind of impact will this feature have on our customers. This score will have some amount of subjectivity involved. Impact scores can be: 5-very high impact, 4-high impact, 3-medium impact, 2-low impact, 1-very low impact.

Confidence: Guesstimate your confidence level with respect to the reach and impact numbers (in the previous steps).

Effort: The kind of effort required to build or implement the feature. Will include cost, time, resources, etc.

See a sample template below.

As we know by now, product management is both an art and science. So the decision to choose a particular prioritisation framework will never be straightforward. The best way to proceed is regular testing and continuous iterations at every juncture.

Jump to blog 100 to refer to the overall product management mind map.

I wish you the best for your journey. 😊