Prioritisation Frameworks: Which One Should Your Team Use?

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 structured scoring system that helps marketing, growth, and product teams rank competing ideas by expected value. Each framework evaluates ideas against a defined set of factors — such as impact, effort, confidence, or reach — and produces a composite score used to order a team’s backlog.

The result is a ranked 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, removing politics and gut feeling from the process.

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:

• Most ideas do not move the needle. The vast majority of marketing ideas produce no measurable improvement in business results or customer value.

• 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.

• 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 prioritisation 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.

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 prioritisation framework

Honestly, the specific framework matters far less than using one consistently. That said, here are practical guidelines based on team maturity, context, and the type of work your team runs.

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.

Good fit for: Early-stage startups, small growth teams, teams running weekly experiment sprints.

Example: A four-person marketing team at a SaaS startup uses ICE every Monday to score the week’s backlog of experiment ideas. Each person scores independently, then the team calibrates together in a 20-minute meeting. The process is fast enough that they actually do it — which is the whole point.

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.

Good fit for: Product teams, growth teams with significant traffic, teams running both high-reach and niche experiments simultaneously.

Example: A growth team is deciding between a homepage CTA test (reaches 100,000 users/month) and an onboarding email sequence improvement (reaches 2,000 new users/month). ICE might score both similarly on impact, but RICE’s Reach factor correctly weights the homepage test as the higher-priority opportunity.

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.

Good fit for: In-house CRO teams, agencies running A/B testing programmes, teams focused on improving existing page performance.

Example: An e-commerce team uses PIE to triage a backlog of 30 potential A/B tests across their product pages. Potential scores how much improvement is possible (based on current conversion rate vs. industry benchmarks), Importance scores the page’s traffic volume, and Ease scores how technically complex the test is to implement.

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.

Good fit for: Teams with 12+ months of experimentation history, organisations with dedicated experimentation programmes, teams that have found ICE or RICE scores too inconsistent across team members.

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.

Good fit for: Enterprise teams, large-scale product launches, experiments that require significant engineering investment.

Prioritisation frameworks for marketing teams

Marketing teams face a specific version of the prioritisation problem. Unlike product teams — who often have a single metric (activation, retention, revenue) and a controlled surface area — marketing teams span multiple channels, audiences, and goals simultaneously.

Here is how the most common marketing scenarios map to frameworks:

Content and SEO teams — Use ICE or RICE. Score content ideas by estimated search volume (Reach), potential traffic uplift (Impact), confidence based on keyword difficulty data (Confidence), and writing + publishing time (Effort/Ease).

Paid acquisition teams — Use ICE for fast-cycle creative tests. Use RICE when comparing campaigns across different audience sizes — a broad-match campaign reaching 500k users needs different weighting than a retargeting campaign reaching 10k.

CRO and landing page teams — Use PIE. The framework was built for this context and aligns naturally with how CRO practitioners already think about test prioritisation.

Agile marketing teams running sprints — ICE is fast enough for weekly sprint planning. RICE adds more rigour for quarterly planning sessions where ideas are being compared across campaigns and channels.

Teams adopting experimentation for the first time — Start with ICE. The goal in the first 90 days is to build the habit of structured scoring, not to optimise the scoring methodology. You can always upgrade the framework once the process is embedded.

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:

• High impact, high effort: Your key strategic bets. The big wins you are aiming for.

• High impact, low effort: Often called “low-hanging fruit.” New teams usually find plenty here, but this category shrinks as your team matures.

• Low impact, high effort: Most people are smart enough to avoid this quadrant.

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Over-engineering the framework. If your team spends more time debating scoring methodology than running experiments, you have gone too far. Simplify.

• 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.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best prioritisation framework? There is no single best framework. ICE is the best starting point for most teams because it is fast and easy to adopt. RICE is better when audience size varies significantly between ideas. PIE is best for CRO teams. The right framework is the one your team will actually use consistently.

How do you use a prioritisation framework? List all ideas in a backlog. Have each team member independently score each idea against the framework’s factors (e.g. Impact, Confidence, Ease for ICE). Calculate the composite score. Rank ideas by score. Discuss and calibrate as a team — the conversation is as valuable as the score. Work through the backlog in ranked order, revisiting scores as you learn.

ICE vs RICE vs PIE — which is better? ICE is fastest and suits small teams or early experimentation programmes. RICE is more precise when ideas vary in how many people they reach. PIE is purpose-built for CRO and A/B testing. Start with ICE, move to RICE when you need reach weighting, and use PIE if your primary work is page-level conversion testing.

How often should you re-score your backlog? At minimum, re-score at the start of each planning cycle — quarterly for strategic roadmaps, weekly for sprint backlogs. Also re-score any idea that has been waiting more than two months, or whenever your team’s goals or priorities shift significantly.

Can you use more than one prioritisation framework at once? Yes — many teams use different frameworks for different contexts. ICE for fast weekly experiment scoring, RICE for quarterly roadmap prioritisation, PIE for the CRO backlog. The key is consistency within each context, so scores remain comparable over time.

What is the difference between a prioritisation framework and a prioritisation matrix? A prioritisation framework (ICE, RICE, PIE, etc.) scores individual ideas against multiple factors to rank a backlog. A prioritisation matrix is a 2x2 chart — typically plotting impact vs. effort — used to visually categorise work into buckets (quick wins, major projects, fill-ins, time sinks). Both are useful; frameworks are better for ranking large backlogs, matrices are better for fast visual triage.

Final thoughts

For marketing and growth teams, the specifics of each scoring framework matter far less than picking one and using it. The best prioritisation 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.

Once you have a prioritisation framework in place, the RACE framework is a natural complement — it gives your team a strategic structure for deciding which stage of the customer journey (Reach, Act, Convert, or Engage) deserves the most experiment focus right now.

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.