Top 3 Prioritization Frameworks
Prioritization is the fun part of product management (lol..I’m kidding). Well it’s fun if you get it right! Setting priorities and aligning the team around it is not easy. Neither is it a one time job. Prioritization is a continuous process. It has three main parts:
1.Looking at both qualitative and quantitative aspects of everything under consideration
2.Getting buy-in from stakeholders on what needs to be built and what doesn’t
3.Communicating the priorities across the organization and aligning everyone to achieve them
There are numerous ways to do it. You can meet stakeholders to understand their point of view, do your own due diligence, look at the market as well. Through these means you collect a ton of information.
Prioritization frameworks help you organize, analyze and communicate information in an easy manner
Lets look at some of them that you might find helpful
RICE
RICE is one of the most popular frameworks. It breaks down prioritization work into four variables and then helps you come up with a score for each project.
REACH
It is the number of people who will see the product update. For example- if you are making a change to your home page then every user visiting the homepage will see it. The unit can be users per day or month or year depending on what makes sense for your business.
IMPACT
The number of people who will use the product update is the impact. For example-if you have a tiered subscription offering- basic, premium and enterprise and you make a change that affects only the enterprise tier then the impact is the total number of enterprise users. Common Units for Impact are:
Very High: 2
High: 1
Medium: 0.5
Low: 0.25
CONFIDENCE
How much do we trust our assumptions? This is tough one. It’s also ironical in some sense because this is also an assumption in itself 😊 . Some way to figure out this value are:
1.Do you have historical data on similar projects? Are you able to use them as baseline for the current one
2.Are there similar projects that have recently been done by other companies? Do you have information about them?
If your answers to both the above questions is YES then your confidence is high because your values are driven by data.
However if this is something that has never been done before then the confidence value will be low. Common units of measurement are:
High: 1
Medium: 0.5
Low: 0.25
You can come up with your own units that work better for you as well.
EFFORT
How much time will it take to launch the product update? This includes time to develop, market, test and finally release and launch. Common units of measurement is T-shirt size:
Very Large(4–8 weeks): 2
Large(2–4 weeks) : 1
Medium(2 weeks): 0.5
Small(Less than 1 week): 0.24
Once you have all these values you calculate the rice score of the update. The formula for this is:
RICE Score=(Reach x Impact x Confidence)/Effort
If you are curious to learn more the RICE framework read our detailed blog on it here
Value vs Effort
This framework uses a 2x2 matrix to help you figure out which areas you should focus on. It look something like this:
It contains two variables:
1.Value: This is the total value that the update will bring to the company in terms revenue, new customers, reduction in churn etc.
2.Effort: The total amount of work that needs to be put in by the whole team across the company to make it into reality.
Each project is plotted on the matrix so that you get a unified view of all the projects. Let’s look at each quadrant:
Big Bets
These are the high value and high effort projects. Often these are big focus areas of the company. A lot of time is spent in validating these ideas through MVP to gauge the demand in the market.
Low Hanging Fruits
Small updates that you should definitely schedule. One of them individually does not have a massive effect. But if you keep plugging at them incrementally they do have a multiplier effect and increase customer satisfaction.
Not Worth It
They do come up very often. In most cases they seem like an easy enough thing to do. Lol..right..as if that’s even a thing 🤣 . But when you look at them closely they turn out to be a huge timesuck with very limited impact. You should ignore these item unless something changes and they move to a different quadrant.
Nice to Have
When some bandwidth opens up in the team especially between the big bets its good to knock off some of these items. They are not super important but will bring value to a few users.
You can calculate the priority score for each piece of work and plot them on the matrix
Formula for Priority Score = Value/Effort
Kano Model
Kano model looks at user needs and puts work in three different buckets.
Basic Needs
Your product cannot exist without these needs being fulfilled. For example if you buy a new laptop you expect the keyboard to function without any issues. If it functions well a customer won’t start jumping with joy. But if it doesn’t work they are going to get real angry real fast 🤬 .
Performancers Needs
Let’s follow the above example. You bought a new laptop. Its battery life is 3 hours. What if it increased to 4 or 5 hours? Your satisfaction with the laptop would increase linearly as the battery life increases.
Delighters
What if I could customize my laptop to match the theme of my favourite anime character. That would make me ecstatic and qualify as a delighter for me.
The key question is how to classify different features into these three buckets. It is based on :
1.Extensive market research to find out what the baseline is in your industry.
2.Developing a deep understanding of your target user. On what drives them and makes them really happy.
Do you want to learn more about other prioritization frameworks? Head over to the Dezkr blog for 11 Prioritization Frameworks that will help you in your PM career.
