Move over RICE, this new Product Prioritization framework leads to VICTORY
Prioritization is one of key parts of a Product Manager’s job description. One has to prioritize things on a day to day basis during the weekly/fortnightly sprint planning calls because of the golden rule: “The resources are limited however the number of things a Product Manager and their company would want to do is much more than the availability of your implementation partners’ bandwidth”. A Product Manager also needs to prioritize items for strategic and a bit more long term-ish roadmaps (typically quarterly or yearly). Every single company out there hiring for a Product Manager, whether a Hands on PM or a strategic PM does desire that the PM incumbent be well versed with the art and science of prioritization. This has led to genesis of umpteen prioritization frameworks. One of them, RICE is very popular among Product folks. However talking about frameworks during job interviews and practically using them in one’s day to day job is a different ball game together.
The RICE model and various other frameworks are popular, but it still does not account for numerous use cases. It may help in prioritization but does it help in a guaranteed successful GTM and adoption? Consider the following examples:
Use Case 1 — You work to roll out a new Product passionately. You have conducted a primary research, have a reasonable understanding of the Product Market fit. You know the impact is high and the product will penetrate to a high number of users since it solves for a latent problem. As development cycle approaches an end, you get a surprise from your CEO who says, “We are not doing this anymore, let’s focus on something else which is in line with our core offering”. Everything down the drain!
Use Case 2 — You are a Product Manager for a wealth management app meant for affluent customer segment. You are building a powerful feature which allows these high net-worth users to trade in cryptocurrencies in a friction free manner and improves the user engagement, stickiness, margins per user and above all the user experience as you are aiming for a one stop shop for all Financial and Wealth instruments. As you ready for GTM of this feature which has taken months of your time along with your engineering, QA and designer team mates, you read a news which says that crypto currencies have been banned in your part of the world and no wealth management app should facilitate trading for cryptocurrencies. Bam, It’s all over!
Use Case 3 — You are a Product Manager for a Grocery Delivery app and you have built a delightful feature and you have data to back that the feature would reduce the delivery TAT by 3X, improve end user NPS i.e. loyalty drastically and also increase both the Average Order size as well as # of Orders per user. you are near GTM where in you need to align with your Ops counterparts. They raise their hands. While they appreciate the feature and the underlying initiative and also acknowledge the impact it could bring, they have pressing short term concerns which is a priority for them and your initiative comes much lower in the pecking order. You have no choice but to postpone the GTM out of frustration and your engineering counterparts are all but motivated.
There could write 100s of other use cases but did any of these give you a Deja Vu feeling? I guess the answer would be a strong Yes. Most PMs may not have experienced the exact use case as mentioned above but most among them would relate to an experience similar. Can any framework solve for most of these challenges, if not all. Let’s try to build a new framework.
Vision — A company exists for a reason and the long term vision of a company guides its long term strategies as well as day to day operation. So anything you choose to do or rather prioritize to do, it should pass the vision test. “Does this feature, fit into my company’s long term vision or atleast mid term strategy?”
Impact — This is borrowed from the RICE framework since the importance of impact does hold true. You need to think big, act big and deliver big. The items which are chosen to be delivered ahead of the others should move the needle in a big way. High impact features with a vision fit guarantees major wins at the early part of product lifecycle.
Confidence — Another component from RICE. We aren’t discarding RICE, we are just improvising on it. It is important to invest time, money, resources and all of it on those items where the confidence of impact is higher, backed by data vs the ones where the confidence is on the lower side.
Time — A slight elevation of Effort. Rather than merely calculating effort, a fair evaluation includes the actual time spent by different team members; Product, Engineering, Design, Research, Business, Marketing etc. in building a feature, rolling it out and taking to market. Building good features is not enough, you need to build good features fast.
Onboard — This is especially applicable to Product Managers who work in a non pure tech company. In Ecommerce, Fintech, Ops Tech space, the number of stakeholders is much higher than that in case of a Product Manager working for a pure tech company. This means that the GTM success depends a lot on alignment with other stakeholders namely marketing, operations and business. You may have envisaged a fantastic feature but if all the stakeholders are not onboard with your plans, it would be a dud with little impact on users or the org. A strong alignment is necessary and it is obvious that the features where the critical stakeholders are onboard with the overall plan and the timelines, the success probability shoots up many X.
Risk — Everything seems sorted so far. What could possibly go wrong? The short answer to this is, a lot of things could go wrong. There are forces of Regulation & Compliance e.g. — a sudden change in the law of the land, breaking out of a war which stresses supplies, a sudden eruption of global pandemic, a miscalculation of confidence or that of impact or the worst of all, the product market fit of the feature. There are so many things that could go wrong. A Product Manager may not be able to assess all the possible risks and alleviate them, however it is prudent, practical & smart to analyze the risks, playout a worst case scenario and discuss what could happen in a worst case scenario, so that, the risk is calculated and informed to a great extent and also hedged if deemed necessary.
You — The last component of this framework is ‘You’. Yes I am talking about You, the Product Manager. You are passionate about building features, solving problems, making your users’ lives easier by giving them a delightful experience, making their journey frictionless, smooth and also helping out the company’s vision and growth. 1 last component though, is also about how does a feature impact you as an individual Product Manager. Though the last component of my framework, it is still an important one. You get 2 sorts of thing out of a feature delivery. A) How does this feature contribute to you, the PM’s satisfaction in enhancing user experience (or any other goal you may have as a PM) and B) How do you think will this whole feature play out. After all you have an inside view of the things and beyond data and research, your understanding of the feature list, the problem set and the solution carries weight.
Together with all these components I create a framework with acronym VICTORY or Vision, Impact, Confidence, Time, Onboard, Risk, You. This new framework should help all aspiring and existing Product Managers to prioritize things and launch successful GTMs in their actual jobs, far beyond talking about it in just interviews and podcasts. This framework may not account for all the components and nuances but I did create it after talking into account a lot of use cases and problems faced by a Product Manager in their jobs. In one of my upcoming writeups I would like to talk about implementing this framework in a real life scenario of a Product Manager’s job and demonstrate the utility. Alternatively you could do the same and talk about it in the comments section here, if it has been helpful compared to other frameworks.
How to achieve VICTORY: Measure and Implement?
Added this section later, in response to some comments demanding a fair demonstration of how to really use this framework effectively. The answer lies in quantifying each of the elements of VICTORY and assigning a score. The higher the score, the more important the feature is:
Vision — Assign a score of either 1 or 0. This is a Binary scoring system. Either something is part of your company’s strategy or it isn’t.
Impact — Score it on a scale of 5. 5 being the highest something which is a rocket and moves the needle to a different level. The next level is high impact feature, a score of 3, medium impact a score of 1, low impact a score of 0.5
Confidence — Score it on a scale of 1. Very High confidence of impact 1, High 0.75, Medium 0.5 and Low 0.25 while Very Low becomes 0
Time — This comes out of T shirt sizing of the launch. Here time should include combined time of Product, Design and Engineering. XXL gets a score of 5, XL of 4, L of 3, M of 2 and S of 1
Onboarding Quotient — This may not be applicable for pure tech companies but most companies aren’t pure tech. This one is tricky to quantify, though not impossible. While the complete onboarding of all stakeholders may not add a lot of positive, a lack of this would definitely be a big negative. You should quantify it on the basis of different scenarios. Most stakeholders not onboard: a score of (minus) -5, Some stakeholders onboard: -4, Most stakeholders onboard but see it as futuristic, i.e. to be done later: -3, Most stakeholders onboard and aligned to do it soon but only if shipped with certain conditions and in a given timeframe: -2, Most stakeholders onboard and aligned with doing it sooner but have some immediate things to take care of: -1, Most stakeholders onboard and aligned with doing it without any Rider: 0
Risk — Only the known Risks can be quantified. There would be unknown risks which would be difficult to consider at a given point since they are unknown. High Risk — 3, Medium Risk — 2, Low Risk — 1, No Risk — 0.75
You — This is another Binary. Either it is a 0 or a 1.
VICTORY score = (V*I*C+O+Y)/(T*R)
So if V = 0, no matter how high Impact and Confidence are, the score gets down to 0. On the other hand if V is 1, a high T and high R, drags down the score drastically pushing it drastically down in the pecking order.
