Lots of organizations cook up homegrown prioritization spreadsheets.

Some brief thoughts on what your prioritization approach/tool SHOULD NOT DO…

• Ignore the “impact of time on outcomes” (see cost of delay)
• Cause you to lose sight of product strategy/vision
• Cannot be adapted to incorporate new learnings / data points. Model is inflexible to new insights, novel concepts
• Obscure the operating assumptions underpinning the model
• Be confusing or hard to understand for anyone in the business
• Be biased to certain areas of the business
• Cannot explain/model prior decisions and outcomes
• Devalue certain “less measurable” causal relationships (e.g. UX, customer experience to bottom-line, etc.)
• Undervalue low probability / high reward bets (or making progress against high reward bets)
• Discourage a balanced portfolio of bets (e.g. only favors one type of risk profile)
• Favor short term value vs. long term value creation (unless that is the desired effect, and is optimal for your situation)
• Favor big batches, BDUF (big design upfront), waterfall
• Rely on estimates vs. actual data for duration/effort (when available). Is too sensitive to changes in estimates
• Encourage arbitrary scope changes (to game framework)
• Discourage experimentation / purchasing information (value of info, efforts designed to reduce uncertainty)
• Discourage conversation, challenging, building shared understanding
• Conflate precision with accuracy
• Ignore confidence intervals (convey false certainty). Coin flip guesses should not get equal weight as informed guesses. “A hunch” is a data point…use it appropriately