Product Management Secrets: Prioritization Frameworks to Increase Productivity

The most effective ways to prioritize and score project tasks may increase your value as an employee and help to increase your promotion. How to prioritize tasks correctly and choose the best options among the variety of techniques and methods?

There is an impressive article, posted on Finsmes that describes four interesting frameworks for prioritization and scoring. This article can be useful for product managers, project managers, business owners and everyone who cares about increasing productivity. Here’re the extracts:

The great examples of prioritization frameworks can be found in popular product and project management platforms such as Hygger, ProductPlan, ProductBoard, and others.

Let’s dive into the 4 prioritization frameworks and their concepts, that are designed by Hygger:

2×2 matrix

The framework is based on the famous Eisenhower matrix. It helps to compare the required combinations (for example, Value vs Effort combination) that help to prioritize tasks better and choose the most important ones for development. Value shows which business value a certain feature can bring to a product or business. Effort measures the resources needed to complete the task

ICE Scoring

ICE system is the method for prioritization that includes the formula for calculating the final score of the feature value in the following way: Impact*Confidence*Ease = Ice Score.

In this formula: your assurance in your evaluation is represented by Confidence, the featured effect on the product is Impact, the Ease is about the easiness of implementation. Here you rate your entire feature requests and choose the most valuable ones to implement.

RICE Scoring

RICE is consists of Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

Reach rates how many people each feature will effect within a certain period of time and how many of them will notice the changes; Impact demonstrates how the feature will contribute to the product and how will the project impact your customers; Confidence shows how I’m sure about all my estimation – both about impact and effort (how much my estimations look like a truth); Effort is estimated as a number of “person-months”, weeks or hours, depending on needs. It is the work that one team member can do in a specific month.

You rank proposed features with these 4 parameters and use the final score you’ve come up with to decide what should be implemented at first.

Weighted Scoring

With this system, you can evaluate product features by your own criteria. Each criterion can have its own weight and scale (from 0…to 10).

Using WS, you can take your features or initiatives, rank them with the help of a benefit-versus-cost framework on a number of criteria, and then use the scores you’ve come up with to decide which initiatives make the cut. The Weighted Scoring method can be useful for companies to evaluate what they think is the relative impact on strategic objectives for a group of possible new features.

After you’ve evaluated all your features using ICE, RICE or Weighted scoring, it’s the time to select the winners from them using a special rank table.

Have you tried some of these prioritization frameworks? What do you think about them?