How to use common prioritization frameworks on a features board

Prioritization in product management is the disciplined process of evaluating the relative importance of work, ideas, and requests to eliminate wasteful practices and deliver customer value in the quickest possible way, given a variety of constraints.

Formulas provide a single number with flexible calculations that allow product makers and stakeholders to decide the most valuable feature to build next and sort their backlog based on that metric.

In this article, we demonstrate how to create the most popular prioritization formulas used by product managers, on your Features Board. For information on creating your own prioritization formulas, see the article Create your own prioritization formulas.

In this article:

• The RICE Framework
• Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)
• ICE Scoring Model
• Value vs effort
• The KANO Model

The RICE Framework

The RICE framework is a straightforward scoring system developed by the brilliant product management team at Intercom.

RICE stands for the four factors that Intercom uses to evaluate product ideas.

1. Reach - How many people will be affected by that feature in a given time? 
2. Impact - Intercom scores the impact of a specific feature on an individual person level on a scale from 0.5 to 3.
3. Confidence - How confident we are that this initiative will prove our hypothesis and deliver the desired results
4. Effort - The total amount of time a feature will require from all team members.

We like RICE so much that we added it as a default formula. If you want to create your own version from scratch, follow the steps below: 

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)

Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) is a prioritization model used to sequence jobs (eg., Features and Capabilities). In the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), WSJF is a prioritization model used to prioritize features by calculating the Cost of Delay (COD) divided by job size to produce maximum economic value.

This framework helps you decide what to put on your product roadmap.

To create this formula follow the steps below: 

ICE Scoring Model

If you’re looking for a speedy prioritization framework, look no further because the ICE Scoring Model is even more straightforward than the RICE framework.

It’s an excellent starting point if you’re just getting into the habit of prioritizing product initiatives, but it lacks the data-informed objectivity of the rest of the frameworks in this guide.

ICE is an acronym for:

• Impact – how impactful do we expect this initiative to be?
• Confidence – how confident we are that this initiative will prove our hypothesis and deliver the desired results?
• Ease – how easy is this initiative to build and implement? What are the costs of the resources that are going to be needed?

Each of these factors is scored from 1–10, and the total average number is the ICE score.

To create this formula follow the steps below: 

Value vs effort

To make this framework work, the team must quantify the value and complexity of each feature, update, fix, or product initiative.

• Value is the benefit your customers and business get from the feature. Will the feature alleviate any customers’ pains, improve their day-to-day workflow, and help them achieve the desired outcome? Also, will the feature have a positive impact on the bottom line of your business? 
• Effort is what it takes for your organization to deliver this feature. It’s not enough that we create a feature that our customers love. The feature or product must also work for our business. Can you afford the cost of building and provisioning the feature? Operational costs, development time, skills, training, technology, and infrastructure costs are just some of the categories you must consider when estimating complexity.

If you can get more value with fewer efforts, that’s a feature you should prioritize.

To create this formula follow the steps below: 

The KANO Model

The Kano model is a set of guidelines and techniques used to categorize and prioritize customer needs, guide product development, and improve customer satisfaction.

The ideas of the Kano Model are based upon the following premises:

• Customers’ Satisfaction with our product’s features depends on the level of Functionality that is provided (how much or how well they’re implemented);
• Features can be classified into four categories;
• You can determine how customers feel about a feature through a questionnaire.

The simplest way we can work through the Kano results is to:

1. Divide respondents by the demographic / persona criteria that define them;
2. Categorize each respondent’s answers using the Evaluation table;
3. Tally the total responses in each category for each feature (and demographic);
4. Each feature’s category will be the most frequent response (i.e., the mode);
5. In case of close results between categories, use the following rule (leftmost wins): Must-be > Performance > Attractive > Indifferent;
6. If you’ve asked respondents for a self-stated importance ranking (and you should), average that for each feature.

You’ll end up with a table like this one:

The idea behind the Kano model used in Productboard is that Customer Satisfaction depends on the level of Functionality that a feature provides (how well a feature is implemented).

To create this formula follow the steps below:

For more information on the Prioritization Framework, see our blog post, Product Prioritization Frameworks. 

school Productboard Academy Webinar

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