Why Product Managers Should NEVER Divide by Effort When Prioritising
I was recently chatting to a product leader about the perennial topic of product prioritisation. Prioritisation is, of course, one of the key parts of a product manager’s job. It’s also one of the hardest, so it’s no surprise that there have been various attempts to provide frameworks to make it easier to manage, more explainable and more data-driven. I even made my own, the NEVER framework, which I believe is the de facto standard in sales-led B2B organisations (please don’t use this framework).
There are numerous popular frameworks out there. Some, like MoSCoW and Kano, are more qualitative. Others attempt to be more quantitative, including frameworks like “Value vs Effort”, Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), RICE and ICE (the latter championed by my former podcast guest Itamar Gilad — check the episode out here!). There’s also other stuff like opportunity scoring and “buy a feature”. Each of these frameworks or approaches brings something different to the table.
I’m not an advocate for any particular framework and don’t advise using them. I do, however, understand the desire to try to bring order to chaos. But, when I think of numeric frameworks, I do have a few concerns.
