How to choose your Product Prioritization Framework

A framework for choosing frameworks. Inception much?

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Many product managers “don’t know” or “don’t have” a process for planning and prioritizing initiatives, according to ProductPlan’s 2020 Product Management report. There are a few reasons for this:

• Many managers simply want to focus on creating value and solutions to problems faced today, not tomorrow.
• Many managers focus on having quality conversations about what they think is the most important and why, without needing to use any score-based approach.
• Many products change priorities all the time due to externalities outside of their control, including commercial preferences, legal, regulatory, and customer.
• There is no one product management prioritization framework that will work for every company and industry. Each company has its nuances and factors that impact priorities, so adopting any one framework overwhelming for even the most seasoned product manager.

While having no prioritization method in place can be tempting if you have a highly collaborative team, a significant downside is the inability to adequately summarize or communicate prioritization decisions to executives teams without some level of documentation or artefact. So I recommended that you do choose one if you can — if anything, it will give you a method to challenge your biases and decisions.

So, is there a way can frame how to choose the right prioritization framework that suits you and your team’s work styles? You’re in luck! — I have supplied you a very quick index of the most popular prioritization frameworks, organized by order of complexity and difficulty.

The List of Prioritization Frameworks

The first step was to collect the popular frameworks out there today for an evaluation. The frameworks, along with their ID used within the graph below, are:

• Cost of Delay and Weighted Shortest Job First [WSJF]
• Cost vs Benefit (Weighted Score) [COBE]
• ICE Scoring and RICE Scoring [RICE]
• Kano Model [KANO]
• Buy-a-Feature [BUYF]