Prioritization frameworks are just opinion laundering
The uncomfortable gap between your RICE scores and who actually decides what ships
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In 2017, Kate Bennet surveyed 50 product managers on Product Coalition and found something that should embarrass the entire industry. “In 46% of respondents’ companies the leadership team or head of product decide what will be built next. Only 13% of product managers have the authority to decide themselves.”
Gut feel and CEO preference were each cited by about 43% of respondents as inputs to what gets built. We invented an entire profession around deciding what to build, then gave the actual decision to someone else.
Since then, the framework machine has been working overtime. RICE. MoSCoW. Kano. WSJF. ICE. Opportunity scoring. Value vs. Effort matrices. Jordan Lamborn reviewed over 100 of them on Product Coalition and found they almost all share the same blind spots. “Unsurprisingly, some type of value is the most prevalent [factor]. This includes anything like impact, benefits, or return. Second place is the effort category.”
Over 100 frameworks, and most of them are just impact-vs-effort wearing a different hat. The variables that actually matter, customer centricity, confidence in your hypothesis, strategic alignment, barely show up.
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia walked through the textbook trio in 2020, but even he acknowledged the limits: “So much of Product Management has to be unscientific. Although data should be used as much as possible, sometimes you have no choice but to rely on intuition and gut-feeling.”
I think he is right that gut feel is unavoidable. But the gut feel needs guardrails. Garrett Rysko made the counter-argument on Product Coalition and called it the McClane Mentality, after John McClane from Die Hard. PMs shooting from the hip, hoping nothing explodes. “When you’re working on a portfolio worth millions, with employees’ jobs banking on the success of your product, your decisions need to be as informed as possible.”
Fair point.
Here is what I think the framework conversation consistently misses. Every feature on your roadmap is an investment, and the cost goes well beyond the sprint points.
Caio Flores wrote about this on Product Coalition: “It’s easy to think that the lack of features is causing your startup to not grow enough, but remember that you have an infinite number of variables that could be causing that.” The instinct is always to add. Build feature X and Y, then growth happens. Except sometimes you have the wrong market, wrong timing, or wrong value proposition entirely, and no feature fixes that.
Hans-Jörg Roser pushed this further, pointing out that even sophisticated frameworks like WSJF miss the downside: “Also a new risk is created! Think for example of IT systems that could lead to new security aspects or simply the risk that comes with the future maintenance you have to do for a software feature.” Every feature you ship creates new liabilities. Security surface. Maintenance burden. Complexity that compounds quietly until it doesn’t.
John Utz was blunt about what this actually feels like: “The pain of prioritization almost made me quit.” No framework removes the emotional cost of telling someone their idea did not make the cut. That part is on you.
Margaret-Ann Seger said something on my podcast that keeps nagging at me: “Empowering teams leads to better outcomes than top-down mandates.” If the CEO is still picking what gets built, no RICE score will save you. You are just laundering someone else’s opinion through a spreadsheet.
The PMs I have seen get this right don’t treat prioritization as a feature-ranking exercise. They treat it as capital allocation. Each item on the roadmap has an expected return, a risk profile, and a maintenance cost that extends years past launch. When you frame it that way, the conversation changes. You stop asking “what should we build next” and start asking “where should we invest, and what is the cost of being wrong.”
What does your team actually use to prioritize? And does it work, or is it theater? Hit reply and tell me. I am genuinely curious whether anyone has cracked this.
Sources: Kate Bennet - “Product Prioritization by the Numbers” (Nov 2017), Jordan Lamborn - “Throw Away Your Prioritization Framework” (Feb 2021), Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia - “3 Prioritization Techniques” (Jan 2020), Garrett Rysko - “McClane Mentality” (Oct 2021), Caio Flores - “The Real Cost of Adding a New Feature” (Aug 2020), Hans-Jörg Roser - “Feature Prioritization: Apply the Highest Counter-Value First” (Sep 2022), John Utz - “It Means Saying No” (Sep 2024), Margaret-Ann Seger - Product Coalition Podcast EP98. All published on Product Coalition.