Comparing Different Opportunity Prioritisation Frameworks

With limited resources and time, how do you choose between multiple promising opportunities? While there are various frameworks and formulas available, the reality of prioritisation is more nuanced than plugging numbers into a spreadsheet.

Our Case Study: An Airline Booking Team

To highlight the challenge we’re going to use an example of a team responsible for an airline booking flow. Their current objective is to increase the search to book conversion rate for business travelers. From their interviews, several clear opportunities emerged.

1. "I need to check our company travel policy before booking, but I can never remember all the rules. I always end up having to email our travel coordinator to check if something is allowed.”

2. "I book for multiple executives, and it's frustrating to enter all their preferences and loyalty program details every single time."

3. "When I find a good flight option, I need to get approval from my manager before booking. By the time they respond, the price has often changed."

4. "I often have to change my flights last minute due to client meetings. I never know what the fees will be until I try to make the change."

5. "I need to submit all my receipts for expenses, but half the time the booking confirmation emails go to spam or get lost in my inbox."

Prioritising Opportunities

There are a number of promising pain points and challenges identified, but it isn’t immediately clear which will be the most effective in helping the team achieve their goal. This is where teams often turn to prioritisation frameworks. There are many different options but we’re going to look at three in this article:

1. RICE Framework

   The RICE framework evaluates opportunities based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Each factor is scored and combined into a final priority score.

2. Kano Model

   The Kano Model categorises opportunities into Basic Needs, Performance Needs, and Delighters, helping teams understand which features will have the most impact on customer satisfaction.

3. Cost of Delay

   This approach quantifies the economic impact of not implementing each opportunity, combining urgency and value into a single metric.

Ranking our Opportunities

Let's see how our opportunities rank under each framework:

RICE Scoring

Kano Model Classification

Cost of Delay Analysis

Understanding Wicked Problems

Notice how each framework suggests a different top priority? This illustrates a fundamental truth about product development: we're dealing with wicked problems. Wicked problems, or ill-structured problems, are ones where there is no right or wrong answer. There are only better or worse answers.

Trying to reduce these complex decisions to simple numerical scores in nuanced problems like these can lead to misplaced certainty. While frameworks are useful tools for structuring thinking, they shouldn't replace thoughtful debate and consideration.

A Better Approach: Comparing and Contrasting

While people find it hard to pick a winner from a long list of opportunities it is much easier to debate the merits and pick a winner out of two opportunities. So, instead of relying solely on numerical scores, we should pair up different opportunities and allow people to debate the nuance of each option. Factors to discuss include:

• Opportunity Size: Which opportunities affect the most users or generate the most demand?
  "The approval workflow issue affects every booking that requires manager sign-off, which is 60% of our transactions”.

• Market Differentiator: Which enhancements would set the product apart in the market?
  "None of our competitors have solved the travel policy integration problem well. This could be a significant differentiator for us in the business travel market."

• Product Strategy Alignment: Which opportunities align best with current strategic priorities?
  "Building better approval workflows aligns with our strategic goal of becoming the preferred platform for managed business travel."

• Current Customer Satisfaction: Which pain points are affecting existing user satisfaction the most?
  "Change fee transparency is consistently mentioned in negative reviews and support tickets. Solving this would address a major pain point."

After multiple iterations of comparing opportunities against each other you should get to a single winner.

Conclusion

While prioritisation frameworks provide useful structure, they shouldn't be treated as decision-making machines. Use them to inform discussions, not to replace them. The best prioritisation decisions come from combining quantitative data with qualitative insights, strategic thinking, and thorough debate.

Not everyone will agree with the decision, but that is the case regardless of whatever prioritisation technique you use. You need to pick something and move on to the next step in the process: identification and rapid evaluation of potential solutions. The truth is whatever opportunity you choose, you are probably wrong. This is not a reflection on you or the team, it is just how things work in product development.

By quickly identifying potential solutions and evaluating them before committing too many resources, you can then come back with new found knowledge and compare the remaining opportunities to help you choose your next iteration. Not every idea will be a winner but we can at least shift the odds more in our favour.