| name | product-prioritization |
| description | Prioritize product bets under strategic, capacity, evidence, dependency, and risk constraints. Use when a backlog is overloaded, stakeholders compete for priority, a team asks for RICE or scoring, resources must be allocated, or explicit trade-offs and sequencing are required. |
Product Prioritization
Apply strategy to a constrained portfolio of bets. Use scores as discussion aids, never as substitutes for judgment.
Inputs
- Strategy, desired outcomes, and non-goals
- Candidate bets expressed as outcome hypotheses
- Evidence, reach, impact mechanism, cost, and confidence
- Dependencies, deadlines, capacity, and risk
- Current portfolio commitments
Workflow
- Remove items that do not support the guiding policy or a required obligation.
- Normalize remaining candidates as bets: target, expected outcome, mechanism, evidence, cost, and risk.
- Separate obligations, experiments, enablers, and growth bets before comparing unlike work.
- Identify hard constraints and dependencies.
- Compare candidates on strategic fit, evidence, impact, urgency, reversibility, option value, effort, and portfolio balance.
- Use a scoring model only when definitions and scales are shared; run sensitivity analysis on uncertain inputs.
- Select a portfolio within actual capacity and reserve room for learning and reliability.
- Record deprioritized items with the reason and trigger for reconsideration.
- Define the next evidence or milestone required for each selected bet.
Output contract
Return decision criteria, normalized candidates, constraint map, comparison, selected portfolio, sequencing, explicit no/not-now list, sensitivity notes, owners, and review triggers.
Quality gate
- Strategy filters candidates before scoring.
- Capacity is allocated, not assumed infinite.
- Uncertainty and confidence are explicit.
- Mandatory work is not disguised as high-scoring discretionary work.
- The result contains meaningful exclusions.
Avoid
- Ranking features without a shared outcome
- Mixing obligations and optional bets in one score
- False precision in reach, impact, or effort
- Letting the loudest stakeholder set hidden weights
- Prioritizing the backlog while avoiding portfolio trade-offs
Source grounding
Operational synthesis informed by Rumelt's focus and coherent-action principles in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Perri's outcome orientation in Escaping the Build Trap, and product-risk thinking in Inspired.
