Every marketing team has more ideas than time. The challenge is not generating ideas — it is deciding which ones to act on first. A prioritisation framework gives your team a shared language to score ideas objectively, so you stop debating opinions and start making decisions backed by data.
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What is a prioritisation framework?
A prioritisation framework is a scoring system that marketing, growth, and product teams use to rank competing ideas. Each framework scores ideas against a set of factors — impact, effort, confidence, reach, and others — then produces a composite score that determines the order of work.
The result is a ranked backlog: a clear, prioritised list of what to work on next. It does not matter whether the idea came from a designer, an engineer, the CEO, or a new hire. Every idea gets scored the same way.
Why prioritisation matters
Marketing covers a huge surface area. There is never a shortage of ideas — your team, your manager, colleagues, partners, and stakeholders all have opinions about what you should do next. This creates three problems:
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Most ideas do not move the needle. The vast majority of marketing ideas produce no measurable improvement in business results or customer value.
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No one can predict which ideas will work. No matter how senior or experienced you are, there are too many unknowns. Research from Ronny Kohavi, former VP of experimentation at Microsoft, found that only about one-third of experiments at Microsoft, Amazon, and Booking.com produce positive results.
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Without a framework, politics wins. Most companies default to weak opinions and the HiPPO effect — the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion — to decide what gets done, wasting enormous effort.
A prioritisation framework fixes this. It forces the team to think critically about each idea before committing resources, and strips gut feelings and emotion from the process.
“Creativity combined with rapid iteration are the keys to making progress on user growth. 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, General Partner at a16z
The six most popular frameworks compared
Several prioritisation frameworks are in common use. They all follow the same principle — score ideas against multiple factors to produce a ranking — but differ in complexity, the factors they consider, and the teams they suit best.
| Framework | Scoring Factors | Best For | Complexity | Creator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ICE | Impact, Confidence, Ease | Small teams needing speed | Low | Sean Ellis, GrowthHackers |
| RICE | Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort | Teams that need to account for audience size | Medium | Sean McBride, Intercom |
| PIE | Potential, Importance, Ease | CRO and A/B testing teams | Low | Chris Goward, WiderFunnel |
| HIPE | Hypothesis, Investment, Precedent, Experience | Experienced teams with historical data | Medium | Jeff Chang, Pinterest |
| PXL | Multiple binary and scored factors | Teams wanting to reduce subjectivity | High | Peep Laja, CXL |
| DRICE | Detailed RICE with sub-scores | Teams ready for deeper estimation | High | Darius Contractor and Alexey Komissarouk |
Two additional frameworks worth knowing: BRASS (Blink, Relevance, Availability, Scalability, Score) developed by David Arnoux at Growth Tribe, and DICET (Dollars, Impact, Confidence, Ease, Time-to-money) developed by Jeff Mignon at Pentalog.
How to choose the right framework
Honestly, the specific framework matters far less than using one consistently. That said, here are practical guidelines based on team maturity and context.
Start with ICE if you are new to prioritisation
ICE is the simplest and fastest framework. Three factors, a quick score, done. It works well for teams just getting started with structured prioritisation who need to build the habit before adding complexity. The trade-off is subjectivity — with only three broad factors, two people can score the same idea very differently.
Move to RICE when reach matters
RICE adds a Reach factor, which is valuable when ideas vary widely in how many people they affect. A homepage redesign reaches every visitor; a niche landing page reaches a fraction. RICE captures that difference where ICE does not.
Use PIE for conversion rate optimisation
PIE was built for CRO and A/B testing. If your team primarily runs experiments on existing pages — testing headlines, layouts, CTAs — PIE’s Potential, Importance, and Ease factors map naturally to that workflow.
Consider HIPE or PXL for mature teams
HIPE introduces Precedent and Experience as factors, rewarding ideas backed by historical evidence. PXL goes further by replacing subjective scales with binary questions (“Is the change above the fold?” “Is it noticeable within 5 seconds?”), which sharply reduces scoring variability. Both suit teams with enough historical data to score accurately.
Use DRICE for high-stakes decisions
DRICE breaks each RICE factor into detailed sub-scores, turning a 30-second estimate into a 30-minute analysis. This rigour makes sense when the cost of running the wrong experiment is high — large development efforts, expensive media spend, or cross-functional projects.
The prioritisation matrix
Before scoring individual ideas, it helps to think about the types of work available. Hunter Walk, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, explained the four kinds of work using a 2x2 matrix, popularised in a post on the Intercom blog:
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High impact, high effort: Your key strategic bets. The big wins you are aiming for.
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High impact, low effort: Often called “low-hanging fruit.” New teams usually find plenty here, but this category shrinks as your team matures.
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Low impact, high effort: Most people are smart enough to avoid this quadrant.
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Low impact, low effort: The dangerous one. Easy to justify because “it only took 30 minutes.” Easy to excuse because “it took so little time.” But do this enough and you build a low-impact team that never achieves anything. Hunter calls this “snacking.”
The default for a smart team without a clear plan is to snack. A rigorous prioritisation framework pulls you back towards high-impact work.
Think 10X, not 10%
Perfecting content, fixing typos, updating social media, tweaking the website design. There is always something to do, always a small thing to improve. But these are 10% improvements at best.
A prioritisation framework separates the real impact opportunities from the little tweaks. The question is not “what could we do?” but “what should we do?” — what is the highest-impact area to focus on right now given our limited resources?
Common mistakes when using prioritisation frameworks
Even with a framework in place, teams fall into these traps:
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Scoring in isolation. When team members score ideas independently without discussion, scores drift and nobody builds shared understanding. Score individually first, then discuss and calibrate as a group.
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Treating scores as gospel. Scores are a tool for structured discussion, not a final verdict. If your top-scored idea feels wrong to the team, that discomfort is worth exploring.
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Never updating scores. Scores should evolve as you learn more. An idea scored months ago may need re-scoring when market conditions, team capacity, or strategic priorities shift.
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Over-engineering the framework. If your team spends more time debating scoring methodology than running experiments, you have gone too far. Simplify.
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Skipping the process when under pressure. Prioritisation is most valuable when you are under pressure — that is exactly when the temptation to revert to gut decisions is highest.
Final thoughts
For marketing and growth teams, the specifics of each scoring framework matter far less than picking one and using it. The best framework is the one your team will actually use, consistently.
Start simple. Use ICE or RICE to build the habit. Graduate to more sophisticated frameworks as your team matures and your data improves. The goal is not a perfect score — it is a better conversation about where to focus.
Growth Method is the work management platform built for growth teams. It combines ideation, experimentation, and analytics in one place, with built-in ICE prioritisation. Book a call to learn more.