Common product backlog prioritization techniques include RICE, Prioritization matrix approaches, such as the Value / Effort matrix, Kano, MosCow, the $100 method and Planning Poker.
The average product team costs between $700k to $1.5m, and delivering payback requires rigor and focus.
Having a robust product backlog prioritization technique means you
- Pick the right things to work on: Don’t mix up outsize wins and incremental improvements
- Efficiency: Ensure robust decision making and allocation of product team resources
- Alignment: Can manage stakeholder needs and align them on sequencing
- Trust: Avoid bias in your decision making
- Transparency: provide clear direction to engineering teams and clarity for everyone else
Picking the right backlog prioritization technique can be key to ensuring stakeholders understand the value of your work, and that your work actually delivers value, in the most cost effective way.
In this guide, we’ll
- Share you to common product backlog prioritization techniques
- Explain some common tips and tricks to help execute product backlog prioritization techniques well
- Point you in the right direction for more in depth explorations of some of the key product backlog prioritization techniques
- Share product backlog prioritization technique templates
- Give you examples of how to use each of these product backlog prioritization techniques
Get the full Hustle Badger Guide to Product Backlogs
What are product backlog prioritization techniques?
Product backlog prioritization is the art of organizing opportunity areas into stack ranked lists, in order to focus development efforts for the greatest reward.
These then inform execution, where the things at the top of the list get executed first, and the things at the bottom of the list are either awaiting more investigation, may be dropped, or may be queued.
Typically product backlog prioritization techniques weigh up factors such as
- Impact of initiatives: Will it make a significant difference or not
- Confidence in the impact of initiatives: How sure are we this will work
- Monetary inputs: How much revenue will we make or cost will we save
- Effort inputs: How hard is it to do
- Customer inputs: Will it surprise and delight customers
- Reach, or size of the initiative: How many users will be affected
- Risk of initiatives (especially in highly regulated environments): Can this go badly wrong
Regardless of which factors you choose, it’s key to pick the right inputs for your organization.
If your organization values customer delight highly, it should be a key input. If your organization is risk adverse and likes to invest product and engineering time sequentially, you should be including risk factors, and iterating MVPs.
Effective product backlog prioritization techniques also tend to
- Create spaces for stakeholder participation, such as workshops
- Have clear prioritization scoring criteria
- Use scoring criteria which are robustly investigated and calculated
- Include the majority of inputs which stakeholders find to be important for business value
Using Product Backlog Prioritization techniques
Some product backlog prioritization techniques are great in workshop scenarios, and some are frameworks which you can display and socialize in workshops, but which require behind the scenes work to get to the most effective output.
Workshops are useful to gain clarity on what’s needed, stakeholder views, and quick information from experts. Scoring frameworks are good to de risk ideation and ensure things stand up to scrutiny once you run the numbers.
When using product backlog prioritization techniques it’s key to understand that stakeholder decision making and alignment is as key as a robust scoring framework. Ultimately backlog prioritization is as much an art as a science, and innovation is often intuitive.
If stakeholders align in a room on the best things to do and the best order in which to do them, that’s as key as figuring out possible future cost benefits of doing one thing over another thing. Everything is a calculated guess, and sometimes hive intuition trumps modeling.
Deciding when to use a workshop product backlog prioritization technique versus a prioritization scoring model technique is dependent on your company culture and context. You don’t always need to make an either or decision. You can run a workshop and validate outcomes with scoring, or vice versa.
Product Backlog Prioritization Techniques: Workshops
When running a workshop, it’s key to remember that
- Preparation helps: share relevant information in advance, socialize goals of the workshop, and ensure that basic components like the workshop agenda and materials are prepped
- Agree ground rules: agree on standards of behavior, and allow a divergence of opinion. Disagree agreeably, and get buy-in for everyone getting airtime.
Let’s go through some great backlog prioritization techniques which lend themselves particularly to workshop environments.
$100 dollar test
You ask every member of your backlog prioritization team to imagine they have a budget of $100, and they have to either
- Take that $100, and allocate it to different opportunities based on their confidence level in the opportunity
- Take that $100 and split it between opportunities based on other criteria, like most value in the shortest amount of time
This product backlog prioritization technique is especially useful in situations where people might argue strongly for things they don’t have that much confidence in, or when a group of decision makers is split. It forces people (literally) to put their money where their mouth is.
Stack ranking
For this product backlog prioritization technique you bring your workshop attendees together, and use them to agree collectively on the priority sequence of tasks.
You can use different methods for this, such as having them all score opportunities according to different criteria, and then come together to agree a collective priority score. You can write opportunities on post its and place them on a 2 x 2 grid.
Bringing a group together to determine priority can be effective to understand where stakeholders are leaning when it comes to different strategic priorities over another. It also allows you to collect experts in a single place and quickly extract information and agree trade offs.
Get the full Hustle Badger 2 x 2 prioritization matrix guide
Priority or planning poker
This is a product backlog prioritization technique that gamifies the otherwise contentious, tedious and time consuming task of backlog prioritization.
It’s usually used as a way to understand relative scope and effort of opportunities and allow the key team who will have to execute the opportunity to discuss it in depth, understand trade offs, and decide on potential implementation effort.
Ever been in one of those conversations where your engineering manager says ‘Why would we do this rather than doing this thing, which takes a day and has 80% of the impact?’ Known as scrum poker, planning poker or prioritization poker, it’s a way of ensuring that individual people all get a chance to give their opinion. This is to avoid the problem of the loud majority dominating discussions, and ensuring that each individual stakeholder gets to share critical information and their views.
To execute this product backlog prioritization technique, you allocate every member of the workshop a number of cards, and they use those cards to estimate either the impact or the effort of executing on a particular task.
You agree on the cards you’ll use and what they represent (days, weeks, sprints) and allocate cards so that people have the same value. You go through opportunities and give each individual a chance to bet their card, and explain their reasoning. You then discuss as a group until you reach a consensus.
To run this one, in advance of the workshop, you should introduce the concept and agree the card numbering scheme with different participants.
This product backlog prioritization technique is particularly effective for avoiding nasty surprises.
MoSCoW
MoSCoW is an acronym designed to help teams manage opportunity requirements.
By managing requirements carefully, features may become more or less viable, and thus their product backlog prioritization status may change as a result. This is important when teams are tight on time and can’t get stuck.
MoSCoW sorts feature requirements into different categories in order to scope the work. The names of the categories form the acronym by which the prioritization technique is known.
The four categories are:
- Must have: non negotiable; feature must have
- Should have: features that add significant value; are important but not essential
- Could have: features that will have a small impact if left out, nice to haves
- Won’t have: features which are not a priority now
While the category areas are useful for getting alignment, you still need a methodology to decide which feature sits in which bucket. You can use a model such as Kano or the Value Effort Matrix, or RICE to determine these scoring buckets.
However you’re running MoSCoW as a backlog prioritization technique, it’s advisable to set up a workshop to score feature sets instead as a first cut: since this allows you to reduce confusion and gray areas around what is and is not needed, and why.
This product backlog prioritization technique is particularly useful for clarifying the scope of what is actually needed to deliver an opportunity area.
Kano
At its heart, the Kano model is a 2 x 2 matrix, where you score opportunities according to their potential to delight customers and the effort needed to implement them. You can think of Kano as a matrix where the two inputs are Customer Delight / Build Effort.
As a second layer, Kano also buckets feature sets into different types. These include:
- Basic features: this is pay to play feature sets that your company needs to be competitive
- Excitement features: features which create high levels of customer excitement and buzz. Not needed to make the product functional, these are the wow features
- Performance features: features which give you predictable increases in customer satisfaction as you invest in them.
- Indifferent features: things customers won’t care about
- Dissatisfaction features: things which cause customers friction and reduce experience
These last 2 represent items that should not go on the backlog.
Kano is most useful for earlier stage companies, with small teams looking to deliver outsize results. It helps avoid incrementality, gives teams a framework to ditch friction topics, and focus on creating company momentum.
Those companies are looking for outsize wins, which customer delight generating features deliver because growth accelerates with delight.
We recommend using Kano primarily in workshops to force teams to clarify what they’re trying to achieve with different opportunity areas. Ask questions like: ‘What will drive the most customer value?’ ‘What do customers not know that they want?’
Product backlog prioritization techniques: scoring models
When using a scoring model as your product backlog prioritization technique, it’s key to remember to
- Be practical not theoretical: It will only be effective if the model is intuitive and accepted by your organization
- Adapt to your context: you can always iterate scoring models to add inputs, or change calculation methodology to ensure it includes key inputs and gives outputs which are understandable
- Maintain: if you don’t routinely prioritize using this technique, and publish iterations of the stack ranking, the methodology will be no more than a helpful mental model, quickly forgotten
Let’s run through some great backlog prioritization techniques which use scoring models.
2 x 2 prioritization matrix scoring
A 2 x 2 prioritization matrix scoring system is where you assign values to opportunities based on 2 opposing criteria. Examples include market share / future cash flow, Value / Effort, or Risk / Impact.
You then plot opportunities on a 2 x 2 matrix, and based on which quadrant they fall into, you determine whether or not to pursue the opportunity. For example, if something is low value, and low effort, it should be removed from the backlog.
It’s good practice to invest time in properly calculating your matrix inputs, rather than guesstimating.
Get the full Hustle Badger Guide to Prioritization matrix techniques
RICE
RICE is a product backlog prioritization technique invented by Sean McBride while he was a product manager at Intercom. His reason for creating the scorecard was to ensure balance across a number of different inputs, from size, impact and effort of opportunity, in order to create a really robust decision making framework that eliminated bias.
RICE stands for Reach (the number of people who experience an initiative), Impact (the value of an initiative) Confidence (the level of confidence in all the components of the RICE score), and Effort (the team and development time to do a thing). You score opportunities according to these 4 components to get a combined score, which you can then use to stack rank your opportunity list.
It’s a very robust framework and is our preferred method for prioritizing our backlog. We recommend using real data where possible, and a logarithmic scale for estimates, since this helps de risk impact and reach, and categorizes opportunities appropriately where there are different scales of magnitude.
Get the full Hustle Badger Guide to the RICE framework
Wrap up on product backlog prioritization techniques
There are many different types of product backlog prioritization techniques.
What’s key is to find the one which works best for your team and your organization.
When attempting to prioritize a backlog, we recommend to run workshops, harness the hive mind, gather information quickly and refine later with scoring methodology. This will allow you to identify the best product backlog prioritization techniques for your organization, and when to use which one.
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FAQs
What are some common product backlog prioritization techniques?
Common product backlog prioritization techniques include: 2 x 2 prioritization matrix, the RICE framework, Kano, MoSCoW, and the $100 bill method. When using any of these product backlog prioritization techniques it’s important to understand which are best suited to stakeholder engagement and information gathering, and which are robust scoring methods which can allow you to increase your certainty in your product impact. Check out our full guide to creating and refining a product backlog.
What are some common product backlog refinement and prioritization techniques?
Which product backlog prioritization techniques are the best?
The best product backlog prioritization technique is the one which resonates with your stakeholders and increases certainty that your product roadmap will have impact. The RICE framework is an excellent prioritization technique to ensure you truly understand cost and benefit tradeoffs before building, but other product backlog prioritization techniques can be extremely useful as workshop and stakeholder engagement tools to understand needs and vision, plus scoping projects. 2 x 2 prioritization matrix, Kano, MoSCoW, and the $100 bill method are great examples of these.
What are the best prioritization techniques for product backlogs?
The best prioritization techniques for product backlogs weigh the cost and benefits of a particular item against another, and do so in a way which creates transparency for stakeholders and gains their buy in for the sequencing. Some of the best prioritization techniques for product backlogs include 2 x 2 prioritization matrix, the RICE framework, Kano, MoSCoW, and the $100 bill method.
Where can I find product backlog prioritization technique examples?
Where can I find product backlog prioritization technique templates?
What product backlog prioritization techniques in agile?
‘People over process’ is what the Agile manifesto states. Therefore in agile the best product backlog prioritization technique is one which engages your stakeholders and drives results that everyone understands and commits to. You can use any of the possible product backlog prioritization techniques like 2 x 2 prioritization matrix, the RICE framework, Kano, MoSCoW, and the $100 bill method, or even just stack rank in a workshop – the important thing is that your stakeholders align on the prioritization and you get to good outcomes.
