3-D Priority Scoring for Building & Shipping the Right Product Features

When your product is in the growth phase, the flow of new ideas, customer requirements, user feedback and production bugs also increases. If you are in this phase of product management, you could be in a nightmare of prioritizing competing features and projects. To make it worse, you are also likely to be resource constrained and cannot take risk to put engineering resources in a bottleneck.

In order to get out of this nightmare, I studied different prioritization frameworks, such as RICE, Kano model, Opportunity scoring, and so on. But, while these are great frameworks, I found it challenging to translate them to my situation in product evolution. For example, in RICE method, the Impact and Confidence scoring is very subjective and prone to bias of “gut-feeling”. Whereas in Kano model, to categorize features in must-have, performance and delighter, you will need to do an extensive customer survey to understand their needs and satisfaction level. However, it is not always feasible to invest so much time in doing research and delaying the feature shipment. To get over these limitations, I devised my own prioritization scoring criteria, which immensely helped me do my job better. I call it 3-D Priority Scoring.