4 Powerful Prioritization Frameworks for every Product Manager
As a product manager, with only a few chances to make an impact you got to make the right choices while prioritizing what to build next from a long list of options. The first and foremost choice is to choose between value and innovation and honestly, the vision and mission of the company have a large role to play in this. If you’re a startup trying to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), you must be focussing on solving a real problem faced by the user whereas if you have already found the product-market fit, you may focus on innovating by adding new features and thereby can delight your users.
Another key challenge faced by PMs is figuring out a way to balance the feedbacks and re-prioritize stuff. Interpretation of your users (includes customers, partners, and internal stakeholders) is a gold mine of information but it’s still from a limited perspective they have. Reacting to every response could prevent you from making actual advancements. That is why we have a wide number of frameworks that address all these challenges and help to incorporate strategic thinking in the product prioritization process. In this article, we will be discussing 4 of the most widely used product prioritization frameworks in detail.
Eisenhower Matrix — Urgency vs Importance
The Eisenhower matrix, also known as Eisenhower Box or Urgent-Important matrix, is a framework developed by President Dwight Eisenhower which helps in prioritizing high-stakes features or backlogs by categorizing them based on their urgency and importance.
- Quadrant I: Urgent and Important. Do it right away. Example: A Client Project
- Quadrant II: Important and Not Urgent. Plan and Schedule to do it. Example: Internal Training Programs
- Quadrant III: Not Important but Urgent. Delegate it to the team. Example: Responding to emails
- Quadrant IV: Neither Important nor Urgent. Ignore or Drop it.
Value vs Complexity
The Value vs Complexity framework views each product initiative or feature under 2 distinct lenses: the potential value it could deliver for the client as well as the company and the effort (time and finite development resources at your disposal) it would take to accomplish/execute the initiative successfully. Once plotted inside a quadrant structure your Value vs Complexity matrix will have the following 4 quadrants.
- Quick Wins: High Value and Low Complexity. There is a very high chance that these initiatives have already been completed or taken care of in some form.
- Major Projects & Strategic Initiatives: High Value and High Complexity. Most of your company & product initiatives fall under this category
- Fill-Ins: Low Value and Low Complexity. Doesn’t require immediate attention and can be pursued later when there are adequate resources available.
- Thankless Tasks: Low Value and High Complexity. Simply Scrap it.
MoSCoW Analysis
The MoSCoW Analysis framework as depicted in the self-explanatory table above classifies the product features into 4 major categories. More often than not cross-functional teams participate in brainstorming activities to decide and agree upon the place of each feature inside the framework as different features could have a different value prop to each of them.
RICE Scoring
RICE is a scoring model used in product prioritization that takes 4 things into account: reach, impact, confidence, and effort.
- Reach: Number of users who would be directly impacted by this feature in a definite timeframe. This could be the number of new leads or visits to a website.
- Impact: What impact or experience does it leave to the customers? What’s the scale we are planning to quantify the same?
- Confidence: How confident are we about the reach and impact scores? We use percentages to answer this question.
- Effort: How much effort can we dedicate to this initiative? The effort could be man-hours/ weeks taken to accomplish the task.
The key benefits of using a scoring model are that it eliminates personal biases, empowers us in making better informed (data-informed) decisions, and also enables us to justify the choices made using proper facts.
If this article piqued your interest and would like to see more such content on analytics, product management, and more, please feel free to follow me! Thanks for reading! :)
