March 2

Prioritizing — Find the Right Model or Cook up Your Own

RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers. As we’ll explore later, there are many tools you can use to prioritize feature requests. Rather than just grab one off the shelf, Sean McBride and the Intercom team came up with a hybrid system called RICE. That’s an acronym for Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort. When the former three are multiplied and divided by Effort, you can list a range of feature requests by its RICE score. Whether you take heed or continue with your gut feeling is up to you.

Product roadmap prioritization: weighted scoring or the kano model? Two popular methods for feature prioritization, illustrated here by Jim Semick, are the Weighted Scoring Model and the Kano Model. They are markedly different approaches whereby the former relies on a quantitative scoring of costs and benefits and the latter focuses more on the qualitative ability of features to delight users.

SPONSORED ARTICLE: Algolia’s checklist for selecting a critical SaaS service. The days of making a once-off purchase for a piece of software is long behind us. In its place are 1000s of new software services that give businesses instant solutions and benefits online. But when deciding on which to use, Algolia reminds us that we should look beyond just features. Equally, if not more important is infrastructure — which includes important criteria like support, availability and security.

20 product prioritization techniques: a map and guided tour. This post by Folding Burritos is impossible to summarize but is valuable — whether you choose to leverage an established prioritization model or, like Intercom, cook up your own.

How to prioritize: top 6 techniques. Some techniques, as outlined by the Hardcore Product Management blog, are a little less technical (and inherently more risky). In Agile Development, requests are organized by Must Haves, Nice to Haves etc. To decide which is which requires plenty of gut instinct. But it can be applied to product management prioritizing too, preferably backed up with data. Similarly, you can Stack Rank requests whereby the apparent least important ones are pushed to the bottom and ignored.

Paul McAvinchey

About the author

For over 20 years, Paul has been building and collaborating on digital products with fast-growing startups and global brands, including AOL and WMS Gaming. Currently, he's a co-founder of Product Collective, a worldwide community of product people. Members collaborate on in the exclusive Member Hub, meet at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, listen to Rocketship.fm, learn at Product Interviews and get a weekly newsletters that includes best practices in product management. In recent years he led business development at DXY, a leading product design firm in the Midwest, and product innovation at MedCity Media, a publishing startup acquired by Breaking Media in 2015.


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