Prioritization — narrowing the list of demands and feature requests is the most challenging responsibility for Product Managers. So you must make the most out of the opportunity and prioritize features to solve real customer problems.
An efficient prioritization process solves a real problem for your customers, garners support from stakeholders, aligns your team’s vision with business objectives, and minimizes the risk of being just an innovative product team.
As a product manager, you know why it’s important to assess an initiative to save your company’s time and resources. But where do you even begin and how do you prioritize which features should be under development and which should stay in the backlog?
We have compiled 5 popular proven frameworks to help you prioritize.
In the cost of delay framework, prioritization needs two things — the relative business value of a feature and the relative time required to deliver it. Divide the cost/time and it gives us a score. The higher the score the higher the priority. This framework helps you in answering questions like:
If you have boiled down your feature choice to be built in the next quarter to two. Use Cost of Delay to choose which feature your team should focus on first.
If one feature costs you $27,000 when it’s delayed per month and it takes three months to build. On the other hand, the other costs $9,000 when delayed per month but takes the same amount of time. According to the framework, the first feature would be the one your team develops first.
This method takes into account the wishes and interests of your stakeholders. As a product manager, you can divide the feature initiatives into four buckets:
This bucket contains all the feature initiatives without which the product will not be launched and hence the most time-sensitive.
This bucket contains all the features and initiatives which are important to deliver but products can be launched without them.
This bucket contains nice-to-have feature initiatives. They are neither mandatory nor time-sensitive.
This bucket contains feature initiatives for future development and releases.
Consider Disney+ as an example when it was launched where:
Kano model framework plots feature implementation on the horizontal axis and customer satisfaction on the vertical axis.
You plot the features on the implementation axis using three points:
Plotting on the vertical axis is done using levels of customer satisfaction as plotting markers.
To plot the KANO model graph, you need to gather insights by developing a Kano questionnaire where you ask your customers how they’d feel with or without any given feature.
Consider for example Playstation 5 console
This framework measures each feature or initiative against four factors: reach, impact, confidence, and effort (therefore acronym RICE). This framework is used heavily by Intercom and here’s what each letter stands for:
Calculate the RICE score using the following formula:
[Reach * Impact * Confidence] / Effort = RICE Score
Suppose you have two ideas — one is to develop a roadmap canvas and the other is to develop two-factor authentication. The roadmap feature would reach 48 users in a month and two-factor authentication reaches 40 people approx. Then you measured the impact, confidence, and effort and calculated the RICE score using the above formula. The higher the RICE score the higher the priority.
In this framework, you prioritize customer ideas having the highest impact on the company’s revenue and value to the business. You can segment and plot the customer ideas on the branches of the tree. The branch with the maximum ideas is prioritized.
For example, consider you have a lot of feature requests from different customers.
The prioritization framework helps bring everyone from stakeholders to the product team on the same page. As a product manager, you decide why an idea will be converted into a feature.
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