Product teams routinely prioritize features, but prioritization starts much earlier. Which customer? Which persona? Which pain? Which solution? While numerical scores help, they can create a false sense of precision for a task that is really about judgment.
RIFF uses four questions to evaluate an opportunity before deciding how to prioritize it.
- R for Reach: How many?
- I for Impact: How much?
- F for Frequency: How often?
- F for Fit: How does it help us win?
Reach: How many?
Reach asks:
- How many distinct users or customers can benefit?
- How widespread is the need?
Impact: How much?
Impact asks:
- How much better off is the individual user or segment, if we solve this well?
- How much user or business value can we create? How much cost can we eliminate?
Frequency: How often?
Frequency asks: How often does the need occur for each affected user or customer?
Frequency forces us to distinguish between a problem that affects a million users once a year and another that affects 100,000 users every day. RIFF doesn’t calculate the answer for you. It makes the tradeoff visible so that you can apply product judgment.
Fit: How does it help us win?
Strategic fit asks:
- Does pursuing this move us in the direction we’ve chosen?
- Does it build on or strengthen an advantage we have?
- Does it align with our target market, business model, and product portfolio?
In practice, Fit often acts as a gate. Not every high-reach, high-impact opportunity is one the company should pursue. Reach, Impact, and Frequency tell us how attractive an opportunity is. Fit tells us whether it is attractive for us.
Prioritize recursively
Prioritization isn’t a step at the end of product discovery. Ask RIFF at every level: Market → Segment → Persona → Problem → Solution → Feature → Implementation. A choice at one level narrows the search space at the next, until new information gives us reason to revisit an earlier choice. It continues into engineering choices about how the solution is implemented.
Prioritize iteratively
Prioritization is a sequence of commitments made with incomplete information. Force-rank the opportunities you understand today, but don’t assume the ranking is permanent. As you learn more about the market, customers, strategy, or feasibility, rerank the opportunities.
If you decide to pursue more than one priority, the question changes from prioritization to resource allocation: how much do you invest in each?
PS: I write about building products to pay it forward and to sharpen my thinking.