What Is Product Management Prioritization?

What Is Product Management Prioritization?

Product management aims to provide the customer with the quickest, most efficient product delivery under various constraints.

Product management prioritization helps to do this by identifying the areas to focus on first. 

Prioritization is a crucial tool to prevent wasteful practices and redundant work. The frameworks help us decide the next plan of action. A good prioritization framework answers the following questions:

• Is the highest priority given to the item that brings the highest returns?
• Will the product deliver the optimum value to the customer?
• Are the product goals and tasks aligned with the business objectives?
• Does the product meet the expected standards for a release in the market?

What are the different types of prioritization frameworks?

The following methods are fundamental product management prioritization frameworks in project management. Product managers should adopt a model that suits their team best.

The MoSCoW Method

MoSCoW analysis or MoSCoW prioritization technique is often used in Agile product management to decide what's essential and what's not. The MoSCoW method is named after an acronym based on four prioritization categories:

1. Must have: Tasks that must be completed for the product to be launched successfully
2. Should have: Tasks that would make good sense to get done but are not essential
3. Could have: A wish-list of all the desirable tasks the team would execute if they had sufficient resources
4. Won't have: Tasks not included in the current release or sprint but shelved until the next

The MoSCoW method is excellent for providing an objective view when working on multiple features with multiple teams.

RICE Scoring

In the RICE scoring system, product management prioritization is done according to four categories: Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.

• Reach: The number of people impacted by the product or release. Reach is usually measured by the number of people affected over some time. 
• Impact: Impact measures how individuals are affected. This has more to do with the quality of the impression created upon a customer - positive, negative, neutral, or somewhere in between.
• Confidence: There are some things in prioritization that data cannot back, such as a product manager's gut feeling and intuition. When a product manager believes something needs to be high or low priority, they can use a metric called the confidence percentage. 
• Effort: A product manager must consider the effort required by every team member and estimate the effort required by different teams on the project. The ideal project should be low effort and high impact, giving the product manager a benchmark for goal setting.

Once you have four numbers representing the four categories, you can calculate the RICE score by multiplying Reach, Impact, and Confidence and dividing the product by Effort.

Formula:

R*I*C / E

The result of this is the "total impact per unit time that is worked." The higher the score, the closer you are to high impact/low effort.

Kano Model

The Kano model uses descriptors for the features to measure customer satisfaction.

• Delighters: These delight customers and are considered to be surpassing expectations
• Performance features: Additional features that make the customer's life easier
• Basic features: The bare minimum requirements a product is expected to have, without which it will not function

The Kano model assumes that the higher a product ranks on these three lists, the greater the customer satisfaction. You can implement it through customer interviews and surveys.

Each product needs to update its Kano model regularly. Customer satisfaction may change as new technology sets higher expectations and new demands.