Product Prioritization

Hello there! 

I hope you're doing okay and I hope you have been learning with me so far on this journey. 

Today I will be talking about how PMs prioritize products and features. You will notice that sometimes when you download an app it has a certain number of features and then when you update it sometimes, there are more added features and this happens over and over again as you continue to use the app. This sometimes happens because PMs have prioritized the features for the platform. I will be explaining this in details as we go on.

First, what is prioritization?

It is planning the orders in which the features in a product should be built. It involves the critical step in building a product roadmap.

I will be explaining two prioritization frameworks;

• RICE framework
• MoSCoW. 

RICE framework: it was created by a company called Intercom. RICE is an acronymn for Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort. 

Reach: it is the number of users that a featiure is going to reach in a given timeline. 

Impact: it is the contribution of the feature towards the goal or objectives of the product. 

Confidence: this is confidence in the impact thst the feature can have in reaching the target audience. 

Effort: it is the estimate of engineering effort required, that is; development, testing and deployment time, 

To my favourite part, there is a formula for calculating the RICE score of a feature, but let me explain how these features would look like on a table for us to get figures for the RICE score in the first place.

 

Features	Reach (per month)	impact	Confidence	Effort (per month)
Feature 1	50,000	7	80%	6
Feature 2	35,000	6	75%	9

From this table, you can see the breakdown of how the RICE framework works. 

Now, to calculate the RICE score: R x I x C   =  RICE Score

      E

So, for feature 1, we can calculate it as; 50,000 x 7 x 80. = 4,666,666

6

for feature 2, we can calculate it as; 30,000 x 6 x 75. = 1,500,000

9

From these scores, it is clear that the feature of first priority is Feature 1.

MoSCoW: the MoSCoW framework consists of; 

• must have features: product does not work without these features
• should have features: performance improvements, bug fixes, features that if left out the product will still function
• coud have features: nice to have features
• will not have features: wishlist of features to be reprioritized later, feaatures that won't br a priority for the current release.

P.s: notice how the first letters of the feature categorization is the same with the capital letters in the spelling of Moscow. Good!

In MoSCoW framework, 

• all stakeholders and product teamalign on the objectives and prioritization features
• resources are divided for each category, for example; must have features can be allocated 70% of the resources, should have features can be allocated 20%, and could have features can be allocated 10%.

Depending on what you see yourself building and the structure in which you want to build it, you can use any framework. No one is superior to the other, just find the one that would work well for you as a PM.

I hope this was helpful.

Till next time.

Franny.