The HIPE framework: a prioritisation framework for growth marketers
Article written by
Stuart Brameld
The HIPE framework is a prioritisation framework designed to help marketing and growth teams determine the order in which to work on experiment ideas.
Prioritisation frameworks help marketing and growth teams to:
Manage internal stakeholders
Bring transparency to team priorities
Eliminate opinions around what is and isn't important
Empower people to share ideas they feel will have impact
What are the key scoring frameworks?
Opportunity evaluation is an important skill for any high impact growth team that will improve over time. Working on the right projects instead of the wrong ones has a huge impact on team results. These scoring help you to determine what to prioritise and the best places to start.
A number of frameworks existing for evaluating opportunities and prioritising your marketing resources. Some of the most popular are shown below.
RICE: Developed by Sean McBride at Intercom. Scoring factors: Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort.
ICE: Developed by Sean Ellis at GrowthHackers. Scoring factors: Impact, Confidence, Effort.
PIE: Developed by Chris Goward at WiderFunnel. Scoring factors: Potential, Importance, Ease.
HiPPO: Developed by n/a. Scoring factors: Highest paid person's opinion.
BRASS: Developed by David Arnoux at Growth Tribe. Scoring factors: Blink, Relevance, Availability, Scalability, Score.
HIPE: Developed by Jeff Chang at Pinterest. Scoring factors: Hypothesis, Investment, Precedent, Experience.
DICET: Developed by Jeff Mignon at Pentalog. Scoring factors: Dollars (or revenue) generated, Impact, Confidence, Ease, Time-to-money.
PXL: Developed by Peep Laja at CXL. Scoring factors: Above the fold, noticeable within 5 sec, high traffic pages, ease of implementation and more.
HIPE framework history
The HIPE framework (developed by Jeff Chang during his time at Pinterest) was designed to address some of the perceived shortcomings of the more popular ICE framework, particularly the challenge of predicting Impact and Confidence with accuracy.
In growth, working on the right projects instead of the wrong ones is usually at least a factor of 10 in terms of experiment impact. It’s normal to have many experiments that don't beat the control group and therefore have no impact. However, you do want some major successes to balance those out. Great experiment evaluation is a required skill for any high impact growth team.
How to use the HIPE prioritisation framework
Unlike some other prioritisation frameworks it is specifically designed for growth and experimentation and finding great growth opportunities.
The HIPE prioritisation formula
HIPE is a list 4 factors, as opposed to a more rigid formula like PXL. Below are the core questions from the framework as well as other questions to consider based on Jeff Chang's original article.
Hypothesis: Why will this idea have a significant impact on metrics? Considerations: Opportunity size / affected users? Increasing intent or decreasing friction?
Investment: How much time will we have to invest in this project? Considerations: Time to develop/implement? Time to maintain?
Precedent: Is there a precedent for this working in the past? Considerations: Relevant past experiment? Note: avoid industry benchmarks where possible.
Experience: Is this change a good user experience? Considerations: How does this impact longer-term quality metrics?
Resources
Recommended additional reading on the HIPE scoring framework and prioritisation in general.
Final thoughts
For marketing and growth teams, the specifics of the various different scoring frameworks, and their pros and cons matters far less than picking one and implementing it within your team.
Creativity combined with rapid iteration are the keys to making progress on user growth. Remember that you can get to 10X growth by a combination of 2Xing a few different metrics, hitting one out of the park, or getting 10% increases across the board. They all multiply together to be 10X. If you can brainstorm a lot of ideas, going for quantity over quality, you’ll have a lot of ideas to evaluate for impact versus cost.
Andrew Chen
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Article written by
Stuart Brameld