I have to confess something embarrassing: back in 2018, I wrote an entire article about prioritization that missed half the point.
The piece was called Silence the Squeaky Wheel Through Feature Prioritization, and it became pretty popular on Mind the Product.
That article was me at peak framework enthusiasm. I spent pages explaining how to score features, create fairness in decision-making, and get stakeholder buy-in through structured processes.
The advice wasn’t wrong, exactly. At SpotHero, where I was working at the time, having a clear scoring system did help me push back on urgent requests from executives and engineers. It gave me the confidence to say “this is how we decide” instead of mumbling something about gut feelings.
But here’s the thing that makes me cringe: that entire article never once mentioned strategy. Luckily, I got the chance to correct myself during my keynote at INDUSTRY this year.
I was so focused on the mechanics of ranking ideas that I completely missed the bigger question: should we even be considering these ideas in the first place?
The promise and reality of prioritization frameworks
I get the appeal of prioritization frameworks. You take all your messy, political feature debates and turn them into clean math. Pick some factors — reach, impact, effort — assign numbers, and boom. The spreadsheet tells you what to build.
No more sales screaming about their “urgent” integration request. No more engineering pushing for technical debt work that nobody understands. Just objective, data-driven decisions.
Except here’s what actually happens:
You spend three hours in a room debating whether something is a 3 or a 4 on “impact.” People start gaming the system, inflating scores for their pet projects. You get false precision — a score of 8.2 somehow feels more scientific than “this seems pretty important.”
Frameworks do help. They quiet the loudest voices and create some transparency. But they only solve half the problem.
Frameworks help you rank ideas. They don’t help you figure out which ideas deserve to be in the conversation at all.
That’s where I went wrong in 2018, and it’s where many teams still get stuck today.
When the framework becomes the roadblock
My client, Eric, lived this firsthand. His CPO had asked him to implement RICE scoring across his backlog to create more consistency in prioritization decisions.
Eric called me in desperation.
He was drowning in scoring work. Just getting lightweight data for each item was taking him too much time. It was going to take weeks for him to make time to go through everything. Meanwhile, new ideas kept flowing in.
“I’m spending more time talking about prioritization than actually building anything,” Eric told me. “And I still can’t tell you what we should work on next quarter.”
The breakthrough came when Eric introduced a simple filter:
- Step 1: Ask, “Does this idea clearly map to one of our strategic goals?”
- Step 2: If no, archive it without scoring.
- Step 3: If yes, run it through the prioritization framework.
That one change transformed his workflow. The backlog shrank dramatically. He stopped wasting time on noise. And because he was only scoring the ideas most likely to move forward, he had the time to make those scores more accurate.
The result? Better conversations, more confidence in the roadmap, and far less time sunk into scoring for scoring’s sake.
Why strategy filtering matters
Filtering ideas by strategy before scoring unlocks three big benefits that compound over time:
- Efficiency → You stop wasting time scoring things you’ll never do.
- Accuracy → With fewer items to assess, you can dig deeper into the ones that matter. Your inputs get sharper, your estimates more realistic.
- Alignment → Everyone knows the backlog only contains ideas that ladder up to strategy. Saying “no” feels less personal and more principled.
The real power of strategy filtering goes deeper than just time savings.
When I filter by strategy first, I start changing organizational culture.
Sales starts connecting customer needs to broader goals. Product managers become more strategic. Engineering suggests improvements that tie to business outcomes.
The result? Instead of “product doesn’t think this is important,” you can say “this doesn’t map to our goal of reducing time-to-value for enterprise customers.” And others start talking that way as well.
That subtle shift transforms how the organization thinks about product decisions. Instead of advocating for their pet features, teams start thinking about how their ideas support the broader strategy.
In other words: filtering reduces noise, so prioritization can focus on signal.
How to put this into practice
The good news: you don’t need to overhaul your entire prioritization process. You just need to add one filter before you start scoring anything.
Step 1: Make your strategy concrete and actionable
Check if your strategic pillars are concrete enough to evaluate ideas against. Good strategic goals for prioritization are specific enough to exclude things. They should define a target customer, problem to solve, or area of the product you’re playing in.
For example: “Move upmarket by adding advanced analytics capabilities over the next 12 months.”
Step 2: Create a simple filtering process
For each new idea that enters your backlog, ask one question: Does this clearly map to one of our strategic goals?
- If no: Archive it in a “someday/maybe” list. Don’t delete it entirely — strategies change, and today’s bad idea might become tomorrow’s perfect solution.
- If yes: Move it into your prioritization framework for full scoring.
Make sure there’s a drop-down on your backlog, spreadsheet, or wherever you’re working to designate how this aligns with the strategy (or doesn’t).
Step 3: Apply your framework to the filtered set
Now use whatever prioritization framework you prefer — RICE, MoSCoW, Value vs. Effort, or your own custom model. (It’s also fine to not have a framework) The key difference: you’re only scoring ideas that have already passed the strategy filter.
This means you’ll spend less time debating scores for things you’ll never build, and more time getting accurate estimates for the things that actually matter.
Step 4: Review and iterate regularly
Strategy filtering isn’t set-and-forget. Schedule regular reviews (quarterly works well) to:
- Evaluate your strategic goals: Are they still the right priorities? Are they specific enough to guide decisions?
- Review archived ideas: Has your strategy shifted in a way that makes previously filtered ideas relevant again?
- Assess the filter’s effectiveness: Are you still drowning in low-value ideas, or has the filter created the focus you need?
Remember: this doesn’t mean ignoring good ideas forever. It means being honest that they aren’t right for right now.
How product ops drives strategy-first culture
Eric’s story illustrates exactly the kind of culture shift that product operations is uniquely positioned to create.
His CPO wanted consistency, so they mandated RICE scoring. But that treated the symptom, not the cause. The real problem wasn’t inconsistent scoring — it was that teams didn’t have clear strategic direction in the first place.
This is how I like to think about product ops: not by implementing frameworks, but by designing systems that embed strategic thinking into everyday decisions.
That’s the power of strategy-driven product operations (yep, this is meta): it doesn’t just make prioritization more efficient — it makes your entire product organization more strategic.
So the next time someone asks you to implement a prioritization framework, pause. Ask the harder question first: Do we have a strategy clear enough to guide these decisions?
Because if you don’t, no amount of scoring will create the strategic focus your teams really need.