How to pick a prioritisation framework - RICE, ICE, PIE, PXL or HIPE?

What is a prioritisation framework?

Prioritisation frameworks are used by product teams, growth teams and marketing teams to prioritise high impact work and projects. They work by taking into consideration a number of different factors relating to discrete pieces of work and generating a score which can be used to evaluate priorities.

In economics, one of the most important concepts is 'opportunity cost' - the idea that once you spend your money on something, you can't spend it again on something else.

Malcolm Turnbull

Why use a prioritisation framework?

Marketing has a massive potential purview. There's never a shortage of marketing ideas - from your team, your manager, colleagues, partners, even friends and family will tell you what you should be doing, and they all think their idea is good. This can be problematic for marketers, for a number of reasons:

1. The vast majority of marketing ideas lead to no measurable improvement in business results, or value to the customer

2. No one, no matter how senior or experienced, can predict which ideas will work and which won't - there are just too many unknowns.

3. Most companies use weak opinions and archaic decision-making processes to place bets on a handful of unproven ideas, leading to enormous amount of waste

As a result growth teams use frameworks in order to more accurately prioritise their work. Fast growing companies use a prioritisation framework to surface the ideas and activities, from the tens or hundreds of marketing ideas and initiatives the team has submitted, that are likely to have the biggest impact on the teams objectives and KPIs.

Prioritising for focus

What is the highest impact area that we can focus on right now given our limited set of resources?

A prioritisation process helps ensure teams are more intentional and intelligent about their efforts, and make the best use of the resources available to them. Evaluating marketing activities using a common scoring language ensures subjectivity is removed from the prioritisation process. The end result is an unambiguous, prioritised todo list for your marketing or growth team.

The goal is to find the 10% of ideas that will drive 90% of growth.

It doesn't matter if the idea has come from a designer, an engineer, the CEO or the office cleaner, all ideas must be prioritised and acted on correctly. The process forces the team to think about the ideas ahead of time, and removes gut feelings and emotion from the process.

Implementing a prioritisation framework ensures team members have greater autonomy over their work. With a prioritised list of 'next up' projects, team members can have the flexibility to choose what they work on next.

The prioritisation matrix

Hunter Walk, the well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist, famously explained the 4 different kinds of work using a simple 2 x 2 graph:

These four kinds of work can be categorised and thought of as follows:

• High impact, high effort: This reflects your key strategic items, the big wins you're aiming to achieve.

• High impact, low effort: This is what people often describe as "low hanging fruit", it is everyone's favourite area to work in. For newly formed growth teams there is often plenty to do here however as your team matures this category of work starts to diminish.

• High effort, low impact: Most people are smart enough to avoid the low effort, low impact work.

• Low effort, low impact: This area of work is like a magnet, it is easy to get pulled into but it dramatically reduces your chances of success. Hunter refers to work done here as "snacking".

Here is why low-effort, low impact work is such an easy trap to fall into:

This work is easy to justify because “it only took 30 minutes”. And when it achieves nothing useful, it’s easy to excuse because it “took us so little time”. However, this is not strategy – this is flapping. Do this enough times and you’ll grow a low impact team that doesn’t achieve anything.

The default position for a smart team without a clear plan is to snack.

https://www.intercom.com/blog/first-rule-prioritization-no-snacking/

A rigorous prioritisation process is the antidote to this trap of low-effort, low impact work.

10X over 10%

Think about 10X improvements, not 10% improvements.

Perfecting content, fixing typos, updating social media, updating the website design. There is always something that can be done, there are always little things to tweak.

Separate the real impact opportunities from the little tweaks.

There is lots that we "could do", what is it that we "should do".

Using a prioritisation framework effectively

In Growth Method teams prioritise ideas using the ICE framework resulting in an overall score for individual projects and experiments.

1. Impact

2. Confidence

3. Effort (or Resource)

Growth = fx (Impact, Probability Of Success, Resources Required)

In a perfect world you focus only on those things that have high probability of success, high impact, and low resources required.

Resources

Recommended additional reading on the RICE 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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