Product: Prioritisation Frameworks
Product prioritisation/ Product feature prioritisation is the way in which product managers decide which feature to build next, based on a variety of reasons. These reasons are generally business, customer and resources driven. For people aspiring to get into product management, these frameworks help in solving product execution cases (usually part of product interviews) and attempting product teardowns.
Prioritisation frameworks are of utmost help when there is a clash of thoughts between various stakeholders on which feature to invest in next. These frameworks ensure that the feature to be prioritised is aligned with the product strategy and business goals.
RICE Scoring
It has four categories — Reach, Impact, Confidence & Effort according to which a feature is prioritised.
A. Reach — How many customers will be impacted by this feature? This number is measured for a specific interval of time and this interval should remain the same for all the features.
B. Impact — What is the amount of impact this feature will have on the users? The impact can be delighting the user, retaining the user or reducing the bounce rate. This scale can be chosen as per the team’s convenience. For example,
3 = Massive Impact
2 = High Impact
1 = Medium Impact
0.5 = Low Impact
0.25 = Very Low Impact
C. Confidence — How confident is the team about the feature delivering the planned impact to the users? Confidence can be quantified in the form of percentages — above 75% is a sign of high confidence while below 50% means low confidence.
D. Effort — How much effort (mainly time) will this effort require? The scaling can be similar to the one used while measuring impact. In the best case scenario, we are looking for high impact-low effort features.
Calculating the RICE score:
Reach x Impact x Confidence / Effort.
Higher the RICE score, the close we are to reach the high impact-low effort fit.
Pros: Easy to use, useful in teams where there is a crunch of resources.
Cons: Estimating R, I, C & E can be troublesome.
MoSCoW Model
This model allows one to decide which product features are important and which are not. The MoSCoW model can also be used to plan MVP (Minimum Viable Products) and in cases where the next important set of features needs to be evaluated for a product-market fit.
MoSCoW is an acronym for — Must have (features of high importance. Example, absence of which might break user flow on a product, features to complete legal requirements etc.), Should have (high priority features over the long run. These are important but even if they are absent won’t harm the business much), Could have (nice to have features), Won’t have (the features that are not needed now and can be delayed for the next sprint).
Kano Model
The Kano model is used when the features need to be chosen based on their likelihood of satisfying/ delighting the customer. A high satisfaction (delighting feature) is measured against its cost of building to see if building it will make sense to the business or not. According to this model, features can be prioritised into three categories:
A. Delighters: As the name suggests, these features delight the users and exceed their expectations.
B. Performance features: These make the product better and customers are attracted to the products with these kinds of features.
C. Basic features: Without these features, the product is useless.
There are other frameworks as well, but these are the ones that are generally used by product teams to prioritise their features. PMs also like to tweak these frameworks depending upon their use to build a customised framework of their own.
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