As Product Managers, one of our most valuable tools isn’t a roadmap or a fancy toolset—it’s the ability to prioritize and order effectively. When building great products, it’s not just about what gets done, but when and why.

🔍 Why Prioritization Matters

At any given time, a product team juggles multiple initiatives—customer asks, technical debts, business goals, regulatory requirements. Without a strong framework for prioritization, we risk spreading our teams thin or shipping features that don’t drive real value.

Prioritization helps us:

1. Focus on high-impact work
2. Say no (or “not yet”) to less critical items
3. Align cross-functional teams on what matters most

🧰 Frameworks I Use

Here are some of the most effective frameworks I’ve used over time:
1. RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort)
Helps in evaluating features with a data-backed approach. I often use this during quarterly planning to sort through a backlog of ideas.
2. MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won’t)
Great during sprint planning or when aligning stakeholders on delivery expectations.
3. Kano Model
Useful when designing user-centric features. It helps identify delight vs. baseline expectations.
4. Effort vs Value graph
The Effort vs. Value graph (also known as Value vs. Complexity or Impact vs. Effort matrix) is one of the simplest and most effective frameworks for prioritization, especially for product managers trying to decide which features, initiatives, or tasks to pursue.

🛠️ Real-World Example from My Experience

While working at b.well Connected Health, we were considering several improvements to our care navigation experience. We had customer feedback, engineering ideas, and partner feature requests all at once. I initiated a RICE scoring session with cross-functional input—our top feature scored high on “Reach” and “Impact” but needed a bit more effort than the others. Instead of choosing a low-effort win, we prioritized the higher-impact feature: integrating dynamic care plan recommendations. The result? Not only did we boost user engagement by 20%, but we also received positive feedback from one of our key enterprise clients, validating that prioritization can be both strategic and empathetic.

📈 Final Thoughts

Prioritization isn’t a one-time task—it’s a continuous cycle of listening, analyzing, adapting, and balancing short-term urgencies and long-term goals. The best Product Managers don’t just prioritize based on intuition; they use data, collaborate with stakeholders, and always keep the user at the center. Next time you’re overwhelmed with requests, ask yourself: What will move the needle now, and what can wait? Let your priorities speak louder than your plans.