| name | prioritization |
| description | Prioritize competing product work using explicit outcomes, evidence, urgency, confidence, effort and opportunity cost without treating scoring frameworks as objective truth. |
Prioritization
Use when deciding what product work should be done first, deferred, reduced, researched, or rejected under limited time and capacity.
Procedure
- Define the decision horizon and objective before ranking items. A priority list for today's incident response is not the same decision as a quarterly product portfolio.
- Normalize each candidate into the problem or outcome it addresses, affected users/customers, evidence, expected value, urgency or deadline, confidence, dependencies, risk, and rough cost or capacity demand.
- Separate non-negotiable constraints from discretionary prioritization. Safety/security fixes, contractual commitments, regulatory obligations, critical incidents, or hard external deadlines may constrain the choice before scoring begins.
- Compare candidates on criteria that actually matter for this product. Useful dimensions can include reach, severity, user value, strategic value, revenue/cost impact, learning value, confidence, reversibility, effort, technical risk, and opportunity cost.
- Use RICE, impact/effort, weighted scoring, cost of delay, or another framework only when it clarifies the decision. Make inputs and assumptions visible; do not convert weak estimates into false precision merely by multiplying them.
- Account for dependencies and enabling work. A lower-value item may deserve earlier sequencing when it unlocks several higher-value outcomes, while a high-scoring item may remain premature if a critical assumption is untested.
- Distinguish execution from discovery. When value or feasibility confidence is too low for a large commitment, prioritize a bounded research, prototype, or validation step instead of pretending uncertainty can be scored away.
- Review the proposed order against capacity and work already in progress. Frequent priority churn has a real switching cost; change committed work when the new evidence or urgency justifies that cost.
