Every product manager wants to build winning products. But it can be difficult to bridge the gap between what your team thinks is cool and what the market actually wants to buy. This is where prioritization frameworks can be helpful. Prioritization frameworks help product teams evaluate multiple ideas and weigh their likelihood of success and chances of satisfying customers against the cost of bringing them to market. In this article, we’ll go over the top 13 prioritization frameworks used by product teams. 

The golden rule for product managers is to focus on solving real customer problems – not things that you think customers should view as problems. In some cases, that might mean making improvements to existing products your customers already love instead of building entirely new and unfamiliar ones. Of course, identifying this requires stepping outside of your own bubble and interests. This is where prioritization frameworks can be both clarifying and unifying. 

Overview

- Common pitfalls of product idea prioritization

- The Affinity Grouping Method

- The Benefit versus Cost Framework

- The Buy-a-Feature Method

- The Eisenhower Matrix

- The ICE Scoring Method

- The Impact Mapping Approach

- The Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework

- The Kano Model

- The MoSCoW Analysis

- The Opportunity Scoring Method

- The RICE Scoring Method

- The Story Mapping Method

- The Value versus Complexity (Effort) Framework

- You can use multiple prioritization frameworks at once

Common pitfalls of product idea prioritization

One method that product teams often use to validate their ideas is soliciting feedback. Feedback is wonderful, but it needs to be handled carefully. Different individuals, including customers and internal stakeholders, inject their biases and limited perspectives. If you anchor onto something a few people have said, you may put all of your time and money into an idea that doesn’t serve the majority of your customers. And that’s how you build a profitable product – building something that solves the problem for the widest number of users!

The Affinity Grouping Method

The Affinity Grouping method is kind of like disciplined brainstorming. The product team and other relevant stakeholders come up with a list of features or products that they’d like to develop. These ideas are then grouped together based on how similar they are to each other. These groupings are then prioritized. This helps teams spot relationships between product and feature ideas. They may identify that one can’t exist or isn’t particularly valuable without the other. This method’s usefulness goes beyond just product development. It also helps organize feedback during later stages of the product development process as well. 

The Benefit versus Cost Framework

This framework requires identifying several benefits (e.g., increasing revenue, customer satisfaction) and several costs (e.g., development team’s estimated time, cost). Each of these variables are given a weight based on how significant they are to the team (e.g., 20 for increasing revenue, 30 for estimated time). The team then makes a list of the products, features, or bug fixes they want to work on, and then they give each item a score out of the assigned weight. For instance, they might decide that adding a chatbot feature gets a 10 out of 20 for increasing revenue and a 5 out of 30 for estimated time. The idea that ranks the highest is chosen by the team. 

The Buy-a-Feature Method

This framework introduces some retail therapy into the process of product development. Instead of weights and rankings, each idea is given a price. Team members and stakeholders are then given a budget and they’re asked to spend that money on what they’d like to see built. The idea that gets the most money is the winning idea. 

The Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a great framework, not just for managing your product development but for managing your time as well. It’s a matrix where the x-axis is labelled Urgent and Not Urgent and the y-axis is labelled Important and Not Important. You then place each initiative into one of the squares, giving you an understanding of what needs to be worked on first. Often, teams get caught up in putting out supposed fires (things that are urgent because someone is raising an issue, but not necessarily important to the overall strategy). This matrix provides a visual map of everything the team could potentially work on and allows them to focus on the things that matter most (the Urgent and Important items). 

The ICE Scoring Method

The ICE Scoring Model asks teams to assign a score based on three different criteria: impact, confidence, and ease aka ICE. It’s meant to be faster than other weighted scoring methods, like the Benefit versus Cost Framework. 

The Impact Mapping Approach

This method ensures strategy is never forgotten. Leaders start with the strategic goals and then they progress from there, determining who will need to be involved and what will need to be produced. 

The Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework

The Jobs-To-Be-Done Framework takes customers’ specific jobs or actions into consideration. These jobs are not what product teams think customers should be trying to accomplish but what their customers are actually trying to accomplish. Suppose you’re the head of product for an HR information management system. Your passion about workplace culture may make you want to build a virtual coaching feature into your system as a paid add-on, but if the majority of your customers aren’t ready for this, it may not deliver the results your organization wants. Instead, a Jobs-To-Be Done exercise might identify that the task really weighing on HR Directors’ minds is introducing pulse surveys to get a feel for how their people are feeling more frequently than when they distribute their annual survey. 

The Kano Model

This model focuses on finding the features that will deliver the most delight to customers. Team members rank each idea by its delight potential. These ideas are then sorted based on how much they’ll cost to implement. The idea that has the most potential to delight customers and the lowest possible cost is the winner. 

The MoSCoW Analysis

One of the biggest challenges of product development is communicating with different stakeholders. A product team is often close enough to the product and its users to understand why something needs to be developed, but stakeholders may have their own goals that divert from what product teams want to prioritize. A MoSCoW Analysis can help arrive at a consensus by mapping out the Must-Haves (M), Should-Haves (S), Could-Haves (C ), and Will-Not-Haves (W). 

The Opportunity Scoring Method

The Opportunity Scoring Model gives teams a chance to turn negative feedback into quick wins. During this process, teams ask customers to rank how important they find specific features and how happy they are with those features. Features that have a high importance rating but a low satisfaction score are prioritized for product development. 

The RICE Scoring Method

This framework also uses a scoring methodology, and it scores ideas across four main categories: reach, impact, confidence, and effort. The final score determines which idea should be pursued. 

The Story Mapping Method

This method puts the spotlight on the user experience. Product teams work together to map out the product journey and each step that the customer takes on that journey. The experience that users have during each step is called a “story.” Teams then identify and prioritize which stories they want to improve first. 

The Value versus Complexity (Effort) Framework

How much value will something deliver? How complex is it to implement? 

These are the main questions driving the value versus complexity framework, and it applies to everything from developing an entire product to fixing a specific bug. Teams use this framework by plotting different initiatives on a matrix like the one below. 

You can use multiple prioritization frameworks at once

There’s no rule that says you can only use one prioritization framework at a time. For instance, it’s a good idea to pair a subjective framework with a more quantitative framework. Your goal is to understand the quantitative and qualitative information available to you, so you can make the best strategic choice. 

Of course, sometimes, you don’t have time to undergo an entire prioritization exercise. You may want to quickly know if an idea is valuable to your market or not. This is where Heatseeker can help. Heatseeker gives you the power to market test all of your ideas. It automatically creates a digital campaign that you can launch on Meta or LinkedIn. Heatseeker’s proprietary models then evaluate the engagement on each of your ads and assigns a Buyer Intent Rate and a Confidence Level, so you can identify the idea that has the most interest from customers. 

Try Heatseeker Free for 14 Days

‍