6 Ways to Prioritize Product Features (with Tips & Examples)
If you ask me, two of the most important product management skills out there are knowing your priorities and saying "No."
Today, we're going to go deep on the former (as the latter deserves a guide of its own) and help you prioritize your work and keep everyone aligned with your priorities.
An Important Note About Product Feature Prioritization Frameworks
Before we begin exploring the ways to prioritize your backlog, there is one important tip that I need to share with you.
Prioritization frameworks are not meant to be taken literally.
No, you don’t have to use it the exact way it is written in the book (or this guide). The product you lead might be completely different from the ones that the author led when they wrote their book. Different products mean different realities and needs. So, it is completely fine for you to adapt the framework to your own needs. After all, a good framework is the one that works for you.
Product Prioritization Frameworks For You To Try
Did you know there’s a Thanos prioritization framework? You just randomly delete half of all features in your backlog!
Well, I made that up. But you got my point. There are just too many frameworks out there. So many, that I will definitely not be able to cover them in this guide. To be honest, I don’t think you're here to memorize a million frameworks, either.
So, instead, I'm going to break down the ones that I have personally used in my product manager day-to-day and share a couple of practical tips with you for each one.
1. Kano Model
This prioritization method takes its name from talented Japanese writer and management consultant Noriaki Kano. The beauty of his approach is in its simplicity.
What Kano suggested to do is categorize your features into these groups:
- Must-be: These are basic features of your product, and their absence will create a bad customer experience (bad retention and churn are guaranteed). A good example of this is the chat feature in Intercom or the customer feedback search in G2.
- Performance: These features are creating user value based on their prevalence. More of them equals more value. Just look at the battery capacity/range of a modern electric car. Better range (generally) creates more value for drivers. Another example is the number of integrations in Zapier.
- Attractive: Instead of adding direct value and covering user pains, these features are instead focusing on improving the lovability of your products. Beautifully designed product vision sections in a project management tool or leather seats in a car are among them.
If we were to visualize the relationship between the prevalence of these types of features and the customer satisfaction they create, it would look something like this.
Here, we can see that performance features are linear in their nature (hence, more of it gets you more value). Must-be features, on the other hand, do not create lots of extra value. Instead, they are meant to remove the dissatisfaction for your users.
Finally, the attractive category is there to give you an extra satisfaction boost. But it will have zero effect if you have screwed up with any of your "must-bes."
Kano In Real Life
How do you apply the Kano model in real life? From my experience, Kano is rarely used in prioritization or brainstorming meetings. The reason is that this is something super intuitive, and you don’t need to draw it on the whiteboard and ask people to classify their features based on these three categories.
Instead, you would usually teach your stakeholders to think the Kano way. Thanks to this, before they come to you with a new feature request, they will pass the idea through this framework in their heads and decide if it’s something worth exploring or not.
This way, you are delegating some of the feature prioritization work to your stakeholders and saving a ton of time on long brainstorming sessions.
2. MoSCoW Method
The MoSCoW method is among the most popular methods for prioritizing features out there. The two reasons behind its popularity are simplicity and effectiveness.
To apply this method, all you need to do is look at each feature in your list and give it one of these four priorities:
- Must have
- Should have
- Could have
- Won’t have
You usually assign these priorities based on a combination of factors, including the value it creates for users, business value, strategic alignment, implementation complexity, and others.
Here’s what a typical list of features will look like for a music streaming service if you apply MoSCoW to it.
- Here, we have assigned the offline mode a “must have” priority considering that many of our users will listen to music on board an airplane.
- VR experiences, on the other hand, got the “won’t have” priority because it’s quite hard to implement and very few users have VR headsets to experience it.
MoSCoW In Real Life
Although you can perfectly use MoSCoW to help you drive your prioritization meetings, there is one downside that makes it less effective for such cases.
As the priority is based on a combination of multiple factors, it becomes quite time-consuming for each team member to explain the rationale behind their product decisions. From my experience, MoSCoW sessions are quite slow and inefficient compared to other frameworks.
But it doesn’t mean I don’t like MoSCoW. In fact, it’s the one framework that I use most often. My favorite place for using MoSCoW is the features list in a PRD.
I usually give readers context about the user value, technical complexities, and other factors in the document before I proceed to list the features. So, when they see “Must have” beside one of them, they have the context to quickly understand the rationale behind my decision.
This way, MoSCoW gets me an easy-to-digest feature list in a product requirements document.
3. RICE Method
Unlike the previous two methods, the RICE scoring model is a bit more structured and less reliant on intuition-driven decision-making. It identifies four distinct prioritization factors and lets you quantify and evaluate each one separately. These factors are:
- Reach: It represents the proportion of your users that this feature will impact.
- Impact: The magnitude of the impact itself.
- Confidence: Shows if you are confident that the people reached will get that impact.
- Effort: It’s the timeframe your development and product team needs for this feature to be ready.
What you usually do is pick a feature, then assign a score between 0-10 for each of these four factors. Afterward, you calculate the RICE score with this formula.
Finally, you order your list of features by the main metric of this framework - the RICE score (higher score = higher priority). Here’s what the result of a RICE prioritization looks like.
- In this list, we can see that the New UI has received the highest score thanks to its low effort and high reach/impact.
- The Cloud Sync feature, on the other hand, is at the bottom of the list due to the high effort it will take your team to implement it.
RICE Score In Real Life
I kept mentioning that both MoSCoW and Kano are not the best fits for prioritization and brainstorming meetings. But what framework do I use for such cases? It’s RICE!
By giving separate scores for each factor, you make it easier for people to present the rationale behind their decisions during these meetings (something that is lacking in MoSCoW). Moreover, you are able to delegate the scoring of each factor to the teammates who are the most knowledgeable in that area.
For instance, your product development team is the best people to give the effort score. Your data analysts, on the other hand, have the best understanding of the potential reach of that feature.
4. User Story Mapping
Technically, User Story Mapping is not a prioritization framework. Instead, it is used to organize the work to be done for your team and uncover any features that you need to add to have complete user journeys.
To build a story map, you will list out the key user activities (or jobs) and then write down the tasks that users need to complete for it. Afterward, you will list all the features that you need to build to let your users complete these tasks. You can either do it with sticky notes on a whiteboard or use one of the many dedicated tools for product managers.
Here’s what the map looks like for a music streaming service.
You probably won't be doing much prioritization at this point.
However, the process of writing down the required features for each job will still help you with prioritization as you will realize that there are missing features for certain activities (that are a priority for you).
You will then quickly add these missing features to your backlog and move them to the top to make sure that you have successfully covered that specific activity for your users.
In the example above, we have an MVP story map in active development (finished stories have the checkmark by their name). By looking at it, we will see that the Account Management activity is incomplete as we have not built the social media logins yet.
So, before we begin working on the artist/album search, we should first complete the account management activity.
Story Maps In Real Life
Just like RICE, story maps are a great fit for your prioritization and brainstorming meetings. One of the main benefits of using this framework is its ability to bring user perspective to the meeting room.
By looking at the user activities and tasks, your teammates will be less likely to suggest feature ideas that are irrelevant to your customer needs and pain points. Even if they do suggest them, you will easily give them low priority considering that these features do not help users complete their tasks.
5. Opportunity Scoring
Structurally, Opportunity Scoring is similar to RICE. However, unlike its counterpart, the criteria in the opportunity scoring system are not carved in stone and it is up to you to pick them.
For aligning your high-level roadmap with your leadership, for instance, you might consider using product strategy fit, feasibility, and potential revenue as your criteria. Here’s the look of such a roadmap prioritized with this framework.
Here, we have used the 0-5 scale for scoring each factor and calculated the sum of all factors for each item on the list.
Scorecards In Real Life
Considering the flexibility of picking your own criteria, scorecards are perfect for cross-team alignment meetings.
For instance, if you need to align your roadmap with your legal and security teams and hear their thoughts on priorities, you pick criteria that are relevant to them (e.g. risk of lawsuit vs business value). With your marketing team, on the other hand, you might use effort, priciness, business goal alignment, market reach, and confidence as your criteria.
6. Effort Matrix
Do you remember the Eisenhower Matrix used for prioritizing your personal initiatives? Well, the effort matrix is a version of it that is more tailored for working with new product features.
The full name of it is the Value vs Effort Matrix, as it is able to visualize the relationship of these two factors for each of your tasks. Here’s what it looks like.
You place Effort on the Y axis, and Customer Value on the X axis. Afterward, just like the Eisenhower Matrix, you divide it into 4 quadrants and place your features on each one depending on their value and effort. Afterward, you prioritize your tasks in the following order:
- Quick Wins (high impact feature that you can do now)
- Big Projects (your strategically important features)
- Fill-ins (potential features with lightweight implementation to consider later)
For features in the time sinks quadrant, you will usually discard them as there is no rationale in having them in your backlog at all.
Effort Matrix In Real Life
Both the major benefit and the downside of this framework are in its simplicity.
It’s a benefit, as you can easily explain the prioritization process to the people in the room and start picking the right features with it immediately.
The downside is that the effort matrix does not show the different factors that play a major role in prioritization (confidence, reach, dependencies, etc.).
So, the best use case for this framework is short alignment meetings where the details don’t matter (as you will usually have a more in-depth session using RICE as a follow-up).
Get Your Stakeholders Aligned With Your Product Roadmap
Prioritizing your work is important. But it will be of no value if you have not aligned everyone around your priorities. Many of the frameworks we discussed today are collaborative in nature and get you the alignment automatically.
But, if you decide to pick the one that does not require you to gather all of your stakeholders in the same room, then make sure that you have shared your prioritized list with relevant people and aligned it with their expectations and needs.
Don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more product management resources and guides, plus the latest podcasts, interviews, and other insights from industry leaders and experts.
