When multiple features seem important, how do you prioritize which one to work on first? Do you take an intuitive guess? Or do you count any other factors? It’s often a blind guess that doesn’t count facts.

However, that's not the way to build a product. You need a prioritization framework that counts your goals in order to speed up your product development.

In this guide, we will explore 7 best product management prioritization frameworks for teams of all sizes and goals.

What are Product Management Prioritization Frameworks?

Product management frameworks provide teams with a clear structure to decide which features should be prioritized on the product development roadmap. It helps teams to prioritize initiatives based on facts, and not simple guesses.

Most prioritization frameworks consider various factors — goals, timeline, resources, and budget — to help product managers decide. It involves quantiative data, customer feedback, and the product vision as well.

Why Should Teams Use Product Management Frameworks?

Prioritization is one of the trickiest and messiest steps of roadmapping and product management. That’s where prioritization frameworks save your time.

A good prioritization framework not only gives you an insight into what features to prioritize, but also aligns your team for the same. Here’s why you should use framework early in product roadmapping:

1. Supports product strategy

Having a prioritization framework in place can be excellent for your product strategy. The reason is: It’s easy to create a vision, but execution is the real challenge.

A good prioritization framework can help you build a product roadmap that is straightforward and clear. Thus, you get a clear picture on what to do and how to execute it.

2. Stay customer-focused

When you’re building a product, it’s easy to fall out of customer needs. Product management frameworks can help you maintain a balance between internal team priorities and customer-facing changes.

There are several frameworks that prioritize the customer, such as the Kano model and user story mapping. Thus, the goal remains to create a product that increases customer satisfaction.

3. Streamline development process

Product strategy shows the big vision that you’re working towards. However, actual development is more tactical with multiple aspects of it. This is where a product management framework becomes helpful.

Instead of spending time building features that may not work, a framework allows you to prioritize features that matter the most. Thus, teams can spend time building high-impact features first.

Best 7 Prioritization Frameworks for Teams

There are many prioritization frameworks for teams and product managers to consider. Here are our top 7 picks, and why you should use them.

1. RICE framework

The RICE framework is one of the most popular prioritization frameworks among product managers. It uses a simple scoring model to evaluate each potential feature based on four options: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

Here’s what each of these categories mean:

Reach measures how many users will notice or feel a real impact by a new feature release in a given period of time. You also need to measure if the feature will affect your entire audience or a specific group.
Impact measures how strongly the feature will affect the users. You need to determine if this is a small update or a major change.
Confidence measures if you’re sure about your estimates of reach and impact. Are you using concrete data or a guess? How confident are you about your estimates?
Effort estimates the time and resources that your team will need to ship this feature.

With the RICE framework, you can decide which features or initiatives will potentially have the highest impact. This allows you to prioritize features based on estimated effort and confidence.

2. Kano framework

The Kano framework prioritizes user satisfaction above all. With this, you map out all features onto a graph based on two factors:

Customer satisfaction
Implementation value

This framework relies on the proportion of customer delight or satisfaction to prioritize different features. With the Kano model, you can sort all features into four main categories:

‘Excitement’ features: Includes features that users don’t necessarily expect to solve their problems, but they will delight your audience if you have them.
‘Performance’ features: Includes features where the more you invest in them, the more delightful your audience will be about them.
‘Basic’ features: Includes necessary features that users expect and need from your product. Prioritize these features as they meet customer expectations.
‘Indifferent’ features: Includes features that don’t do anything for customer satisfaction.

When you use the Kano framework, always prioritize features that lead to high user satisfaction levels. It’s helpful if you’re an early-stage startup and need to figure out the best must-have features.

3. User story mapping

User story mapping is one of the best agile startup frameworks. It focuses on adding features to improve the user experience.

User story mapping generally has three steps:

As you begin, identify the core user journeys for your product. You want to define the key goals and core tasks that users need to achieve with your product.
Next, note down each step of the user journey into boxes across the top of your user story map.
The last step is to list down the tasks, steps, or features users need to accomplish that particular step. Sort each feature with the highest-priority features at the top.

At the end, you will have a map that shows the entire user journey along with the necessary features. Since relevant features are ranked based on importance, your team gets a clear picture of user experience and hidden gaps.

4. MoSCoW framework

The MoSCoW framework can be used for companies of any size: early-stage or mid-stage. It’s suitable for all teams and stages of product development.

With the MoSCoW framework, you sort all features in four categories:

Must-have: Includes all necessary, basic features for your product at the current stage.
Should-have: Includes all features important to the product, but not urgent at this stage.
Could-have: Includes features that would be nice to have but aren’t important yet.
Won’t-have: Includes features that could be added but will have no measurable impact.

If you’re struggling to prioritize features for the current iteration, the MoSCoW framework is great for it. Whether you’re building a minimum viable product (MVP) or your app’s V1, the method can help you organize what’s important at present.

5. Cost of Delay framework

The Cost of Delay framework allows product managers to estimate the financial impact of prioritizing or de-prioritizing any given feature. This framework helps product managers prioritize features based on potential value rather than user satisfaction.

For this framework, you need to estimate the time and effort each potential feature will take to build. Ask your team the following questions then:

How much revenue will this feature generate after launch?
Is it worth getting built earlier than planned?
How much money would we lose if it gets delayed?

Using the estimated answers, you can figure out which features have the highest potential financial value given the effort required. Then you can prioritize them accordingly.

6. Impact x Effort Matrix

Impact x Effort Matrix, also known as the ‘Value x Effort’ matrix, helps product managers prioritize features against two values:

Impact: How much this feature will benefit the users
Effort: How much time and resources will your team take to build it

Using the Impact x Effort matrix, you sort all features into four categories:

Quick wins: Includes low-effort, high-value projects that will have a substantial impact on user experience given their effort level.
Important projects: Includes high-effort, high-value projects that require a lot of effort to build, but also have a substantial impact on user experience.
Fill-ins: Includes low-effort, low-value projects that take minimal work, but don’t make a huge impact for the user.
Time wasters: Includes high-effort, low-value projects that require a lot of effort and have no impact for anyone. These should generally be avoided.

The Impact x Effort matrix is great for small teams that are in the early stages of product development and need to move fast. Prioritize features added to the ‘quick wins’ and ‘important projects’ categories, while saving the ‘fill-ins’ and ‘time wasters’ for later.

7. Opportunity Scoring

Opportunity Scoring ranks opportunities on a graph that plots importance against customer satisfaction. It works by surveying users about the existing features rather than potential ideas — making it similar to the Kano model.

With this framework, you brainstorm features or outcomes that could be accomplished and ask your customers to:

Rank the listed outcomes in order of importance, and
Mark how satisfied they are with the current solution for that outcome.

You can use these answers to categories the features as:

Overserved: Include features that aren’t as important to users, but they’re satisfied with your solution.
Appropriately served: Include features that are important and users are delighted with.
Underserved: Include features that are crucial to users, but they aren’t satisfied with your solution.

In the next round of iterations, you can focus on the underserved features or outcomes to improve customer satisfaction and strengthen product-market fit. This framework is great for finding gaps and improving a product.

How to Choose a Product Management Framework?

The goal of using a prioritization framework is to consider various prioritization factors and align your team on the same page for it. So, how exactly do you choose the right framework for your team?

Here we’ve listed a few suggestions:

Whether your team is small or large, choose a framework that works well with your team size.
The framework should give you tangible ways to list down and prioritize upcoming features and plans.
Make sure that the framework is suitable for your current product stage and business goals — both short-term and long-term.
Choose a framework that also allows you to include features as ‘for later’.

Sometimes, teams also use more than one framework at different points in the product development process or in tandem. It’s perfectly fine to use more than one frameworks. Just make sure that you don’t get tied up in roadmapping.

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