🛠️ How To Build The RIGHT Product Prioritization Framework [4/5]

A step-by-step guide to build and roll out a prioritization framework for your product team

This post is part of a series. This is part 4.

In the previous article, we shared 15 proven product prioritization frameworks and categorized them by multiple themes to help you get inspired. In this article, I’ll share with you a simple guide to help guide you into constructing a framework for your team.

Although it's easier to simply pick an existing framework, often that won’t lead to successful decisions or outcomes, which is the main reason for a prioritization framework in the first place.

Why? Because the nature of the team, culture, and the company stage plays a huge role. It’s also important to understand the key ingredients of a great framework.

The ultimate goal of this post is to help you eventually build something like this. The key ingredients here are:

1. Items categorized by themes
2. Benefit and cost related factors to prioritize upon
3. Weight multiplier to give each factor more priority with time
4. Total score & final relative rank

Taken from ProductPlan

I won’t share with you what factors to prioritize upon, but instead, key tips, I managed to gather through my experience, to help you decide on the right ones.

So, here’s how to get there:

1. Set up (or align with) your product strategy [ 6 tips]
2. Build your prioritization framework [7 tips]
3. Seek team-wide buy-in [5 tips]
4. Standardize your process with flexibility in mind [3 tips]

1) Set up your product strategy

Let me start by saying this…

In many cases, the struggle to prioritize features is just a symptom of something bigger. The real problem is usually a lack of strategic vision or direction. In the previous post, where I shared the 10 Common Product Prioritization Challenges, the top and main important challenge was:

Without a strategy, you’re prioritizing for nowhere.

I’ll keep this short and simple sharing some tips below. I’ll share a detailed and complete “how-to” guide to nail your product strategy in the near future.

Tip 1: Flexibility or predictable process?

Part of the strategy is understanding the “culture” and company “stage”. First, you want to build a framework that suits your company’s stage and culture. You need to figure out whether your company favors “flexibility” or “predictable process”. It’s incredibly hard to implement an objective collective prioritization framework in an environment that doesn’t buy it.

For some teams, particularly in big companies, a strict set of guidelines can help make processes more effective. For example, if your team would benefit from clearly defined rules in your prioritization approach, you might choose a framework such as feature-driven development (FDD). But suppose you want to create more freedom to be creative in your prioritization decisions. In that case, you might instead opt for the Crystal Agile Framework

Tip 2: Understand your customer and your market

Next, you need to understand your customer and your market to understand the right customer-related factors that you need to define. This plays a huge factor. I remember in ClickUp, we decided on heavily prioritizing features around customer returns more than business returns in our early stage just because the market was super competitive. New project management software were popping up literally every week and no-code tools enabled an easy entry into the market

If you have a product already, gather data to understand the “highest value initiatives” and uncover what makes them “valuable” to your customers. This will give you an objective and key factor you need to prioritize upon.

Tip 3: What defines success?

Let’s say your company plans to take the product-led growth approach. Your strategy and product growth is built upon a product that essentially sells itself. In a nutshell, you decide that instead of growing a sales department, you will make your product easy for customers to find, try, and buy later.

With this “success approach” defined, you will focus entirely on delighting customers with your product, and you will not worry about growing revenue in the short term, which is exactly what we did at ClickUp. With this in mind, it’s better to opt in for one of the customer-centric frameworks, such as MoSCoW, JTBD, DIE, or the Kano Model (shared here, 15 known frameworks). Your priority would be making happy customers.

If, on the other hand, you were a small startup with a minimal operating budget and impatient investors, you might instead choose a prioritization framework focused on revenue-generating metrics. One example would be the AARRR framework because this approach prioritizes only those items that directly affect a business’s bottom line, such as customer acquisition and revenue.

Tip 4: How much do your resource levels affect your priorities?

If your product team can secure only a small number of developers and a limited budget for your product, that should play a role in which prioritization framework you select.

For example, the size of your company, the amount of data your team can compile and analyze, and how well your team collaborates on strategy, all of these can influence which framework will be right for you at the time. You can’t suggest a framework that relies on data to justify feature prioritization when you don’t have data analytics yet.

Tip 5: Define your product’s strategic objectives.

Once you have a clear strategy, you need to define your monthly or quarterly goals (or OKRs) upon which initiatives will be prioritized upon. This leaves no room for debating whether we push feature A or B. One of your guiding stars will be “does this help us reach our OKR?”

Tip 6: Confirm and communicate.

Once your product strategy is complete and before suggesting any prioritization framework yet, you need to communicate and get buy-in to your strategy from the entire company.

It’s useless to go build or define a framework when the overall strategy or objectives are ambiguous. No matter the factors you eventually pick for prioritization they won’t make sense.

2) Build your prioritization framework

With your product strategy ready and well communicated, it’s time to agree on the factors for your prioritization framework. Below are tips to help you drive the right ones.

Tip 1: Keep strategy and OKRs in mind

This has to be your first factor!

Ensure to have a factor that links each of your initiatives (features, epics, projects, etc) to your OKRs. You can call that “business impact” or whatever, but you need to include a factor that is a “metric mover”.

This is important to ensure you have a healthy mix of strategic initiatives and quick wins so that you are not only focusing on easy items, or customer-requested features (customers don’t innovate) but also keeping an eye on long-term visionary initiatives ensuring competitive advantage.

Tip 2: Always include value and resource related factors

Another two key factors you need to always include in your prioritization equation are a customer (value-based factor) and resource (effort-based factor)

No matter what you’re building or at what stage your company is at, you’re always building something for someone and you’re always limited with resources. Hence, you need to take these into consideration when prioritizing initiatives.

Tip 3: Quantitative & relative weight-based scoring

In ClickUp, we tend to get a long list of P1s, everything seemed to be priority 1, which got us always to have an endless debate that starts like this:

“Okay, among those 50 P1s, which are the top 5 we need to tackle 😅?”

Effective frameworks are built to answer this question and the only way is through a quantitative score for each feature or idea.

Another effective tactic is to score features and ideas relative to each other. At the end of the day a score of “5426” will not effectively communicate a priority. What you need to do instead, is to divide each feature’s score by the total score of all features to eventually get a relative rank!

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say I pitched you a startup idea named “Idea A” and asked you:

“How big this idea is?” from 1–5.

Let’s say that idea was in the Fintech market and you gave it a 4/5. Now, how would this rank changes if instead, I ask you:

“Among idea B and idea C, how big would idea A be?”

The story is different now, previously the maximum score of “5” had no reference point, but now 5 is relative to the score of the 3 ideas you have in your backlog, you’re defining idea A in comparison to idea B and idea C, hence resulting in a more effective decision-making approach.

In a nutshell, “weight-based” scoring is a weighted aggregation of drivers that are used to quantify the importance of a feature. It is calculated using a weighted average of each feature’s score across all drivers.

Tip 4: Establish a process/tool for gathering new feature ideas (product backlog)

No matter what framework you pick, you need options ( a lot of them) for decisions making to make sense. That’s what product backlog is all about.

It’s nothing but a place to collect as many feature ideas as possible to then prioritize the top ones.

In my opinion, a huge differentiator between a good PM and a great one is whether or not he can establish a complete system to capture, analyze and communicate feature ideas (or any kind of insights that will end up shaping your product). You need to create a channel that captures those ideas from every touchpoint that occurs with your customers.

Your customer interacts with more than your product. They get approached by marketing, maybe got sold to by sales and after joining your product, they probably talk with account managers or customer support. All these touchpoints are opportunities for a PM to capture meaningful insights.

Some opposition goes like this:

“Wait a sec…so to make a decision, you’re saying we need a lot of options! Then why don’t we just cut all these options (say no often) and not have to worry about making decisions every day ”

This school suggests killing the product backlog and saying no to almost every feature idea until it re-appears again and again (i.e Shape-Up methodology by Basecamp which I love!). The rule is simple: if the idea keeps popping up again and again, then it’s important and needs to be done.

I, however, believe that there’s a power that comes from “quantity”. After all, you don’t know the value of what you don’t know. Collecting as many as possible will enable you to apply the 80/20 principle and get the 20 top ideas that make an 80% impact on your product.

So ensure you organize all feature ideas in one place, a source of truth for all incoming insights, feedback, and requests. It’s hard to suggest a tool, but I can suggest the below characteristics of a successful one:

1. Easy capture > a form for your internal team and customers to share ideas, problems, requests, insights, etc
2. A database > a sheet, ClickUp list, Notion DB to gather all these ideas
3. A dialogue + community > an environment (Slack, Forum, etc) to communicate with the idea poster and enable voting among the community (customer or internal employees)

Tip 5: Support a score by data!

I highly suggest using data to back up all incoming feature ideas and their scores.

Data is key to product prioritization.

So next time someone pushes an idea, say “show me the numbers.” Make it mandatory to enter all the criteria for you to prioritize items. The same thing applies when a PM prioritizes features. It becomes pretty defensive and debatable when a PM says “I gave this idea 4/5” and when asked why, he explains that with gut feeling and some assumptions.

Instead, the lingo should go like this:

“I gave this idea 4/5 in terms of Reach because 500 customers reach this point in the signup funnel each month, and 30% choose this option. The reach is 500 × 30% = 150 customers per month”

Now, that’s harder to disagree upon resulting in fewer debates, less hesitation, and more time to get things done!

Tip 6: Limit the number of items you prioritize at a time.

I’m not sure if you ever faced that before, but at ClickUp that was one of our daily struggles as PMs. Let’s elaborate a bit here.

At ClickUp, I helped in building what we ended up calling a System of Insights (SOI) [which I’ll share about it more in the future].

This was a huge initiative to ensure we capture competitor, user, and market insights and analyze those to inspire our product decisions. The problem was, whenever any of our PMs came to prioritize (or even read) the list of ideas we have, they were tons! We used to get on average 65 new feature ideas every day from Canny (a third-party tool that acts like a forum enabling our users to share and vote on ideas)

Grooming and prioritizing became a full-time job until we decided to block a time in our calendar and randomly go through 20 feature ideas a day and quickly prioritize them.

You need to make this a recurring activity and, if you have tons of ideas, you don’t want to spend so much time prioritizing. Build a habit of going through a bunch of them on an ongoing basis.

Tip 7: Categorize these initiatives into themes for your product roadmap.

Themeing is a powerful thing. When you prioritize initiatives, it becomes super easy to communicate when you bucket them into easy-to-understand categories.

For example, you can categorize them by product areas, or product themes (Moonshoot, Quick wins, Metric movers).

The goal of this is better communication. It’s all about context.

3) Seek team-wide buy-in

I can’t emphasize this more, but this is the most important step of them all.

Because I live and breathe systems, I know this by heart. You’ll remember me when you try to push a new system into your company. And this sets the difference between a great PM and a normal one.

First, you need to know that you’ll always get a pushback to add this or that. Changing human behaviors is scary and will always be faced with some sort of resistance.

Always frame the discussion around the notion that it’s not whether the current process is good or bad but rather try to say that the new process will yield a higher return than what used to be done.

Below are some tips I highly recommend to roll out any new process in an established company. These will help you practice your communication and persuasion skills.

Tip 1: Apply it before preaching it

This is the secret sauce and the first important step for ensuring you get buy-in. You don’t want to start presenting your proposition of the new prioritization framework and then face issues in some edge cases or get asked questions you can’t find an answer for.

So before putting together that fancy PowerPoint to pitch your framework, consider testing it alone (or with a group of your team) for some cases while focusing on proving better results.

This will become your “proof” that this works and is way more beneficial to the team than the current process.

Tip 2: Share your new framework with all stakeholders

Once you’re confident of the potential impact, you need to get alignment with everyone at the company.

Remember that you won’t be able to make everyone happy, but the key is to make them satisfied that you’ve applied a rigorous well-thought process and factors that will objectively better impact the business.

So before pitching it to everyone, one key tip is to build a movement!

This starts by getting a buy-in from your colleagues, those that are open-minded and happy with change or have always been annoyed by the current process (aka your early adopters). Walk the team through the framework’s formulas and processes, and communicate to them why you believe it will help everyone make better strategic decisions for the product.

Tip 3: Run a mock prioritization session

Next, start wearing the “educator” hat. Warm up your audience by preaching about product prioritization in general, the benefits of it, how great companies succeed because of it, etc.

You can easily slip bits of wisdom during your company’s Lunch & Learn sessions.

Then, run through a mock prioritization session. Use a hypothetical product with a list of competing feature ideas, and ask the team to score or rank them all based on your chosen framework’s approach.

Tip 4: Focus on quick and small changes to get approvals

Great salesmen always say “Get the small yes first!”

The same thing applies when you try to change people's behaviors. You don’t want to roll the entire process at once. Instead, start rolling it out in bits.

Small changes provide quicker results which makes it easier to get approvals from your line manager.

This is the power of momentum. Quick and small changes compound to eventually earn you a BIG yes.

Tip 5: Keep the old system, while having an environment for the new one

Well, PMs are not developers, so we probably miss this part, a lot 😅

Any developer, however, has documented history of all previous versions. I’ve done this mistake before when I rolled out a new product development process on top of our existing one.

So, in short, build the new process in a new environment while keeping the old one. It’s going to be a bit challenging where you’ll have to balance between two environments or processes but is helpful to make the shift.

4) Standardize your process with flexibility in mind

Product managers must remember that a prioritization framework that works today might not work tomorrow or in a year. In other words, it needs continuous updating or changing according to the evolving culture, scalability, etc.

The most effective framework is the one that adapts and grows with you. So here are some tips.

Tip 1: Once approved, don’t settle, keep monitoring

One risk when introducing a prioritization framework is that, although your coworkers might be onboard with the science behind how it works, they won’t follow the same process you’ve laid out.

They’ll still need guidance and coaching. For example, if you introduce the AARRR method, some members of your product team might focus only on two of the metrics in that framework and might ignore customer retention, referrals, and revenue. Or you might find them get confused about scoring features according to the AARRR definitions.

You want everyone to review initiatives according to the same criteria. So, always ensure undergoing continuous monitoring, support, and evaluation of the process, while tweaking whenever needed.

Tip 2: Gather feedback and be open for long-term change

There’s a crucial thing you need to be aware of processes and systems: they need to be flexible and designed to change as your company and objectives grow!

So, create a form or a list where you gather all the feedback from the team about suggestions, feedback, system tweaks, etc. The goal is to make this process improves with time.

After all, successful processes are those that are dynamic, and get better with time!

Tip 3: Remember the 90-day rule

When onboarding new employees, some companies ask for the “90-day” plan, while monitoring those newcomers with a focused lens for some period.

Similarly, this applies to systems.

Habit-building experts would say that it needs 90 days to make a new change, so you need to be aware for 90 days of this new roll-out.

Just like when shipping a feature, you usually need to monitor user behavior for some time to assess the success measures and metrics.

Wrapping up…

Strategy comes first! I’ll leave Suzanne (CEO at The Development Factory) to conclude this:

“In many cases, the struggle to prioritize features is just a symptom of something bigger. The real problem is usually a lack of strategic vision or direction.”

You then need to ensure you have factors around benefits, cost to make better decisions while making the framework robust by quantitative measures and relative scoring practices.

Finally, effectively communicating a new prioritization framework is a skill set that every PM needs to have! Practice these skills to ensure a successful roll-out of your prioritization framework.

In the next post, I’m going a bit deeper sharing a complete template to quickly duplicate and start using in your favorite project management solution: Notion, ClickUp, Coda, Airtable, or Fibery.

I’ll decide on the tool based on your votes, so please share with me in the comments, if that’s something you want to see and what tool you’d like to have the template.

Check it out here [coming soon 😊]