.png)
%202.png)
Prioritisation is a core skill for Product Managers, especially when resources are limited and stakeholder requests are endless. This article breaks down three of the most effective prioritisation frameworks: RICE, MoSCoW, and the 100 Point Method. Explaining exactly when to use each!
🔢 RICE is best when you need to make data-driven, effort-sensitive decisions for roadmap planning.
🪄 MoSCoW excels at scoping MVPs and releases with strict deadlines or resource constraints.
💯 The 100 Point Method is perfect for collaborative workshops where alignment across stakeholders is key.
Backed by real-world case studies and FAQs, this article will help you choose the right tool for any product prioritisation challenge.
As a Product Manager, you will eventually encounter the same roadblock faced unanimously. You can’t build everything.
Whether it be limited engineering bandwidth, shifting market demands, or a never-ending stream of feature requests, knowing what to build next isn’t just helpful, it’s essential. As a Product Manager, prioritisation is how to progress teams from being busy, to being strategic.
The catch with product prioritisation is it’s often clouded by gut instincts, stakeholder volume, and internal politics making the decision making process challenging. For those struggling to prioritise their backlog, several frameworks are available offering a structured and consistent approach for evaluating what truly matters, creating clear and unified team decisions for product direction.
Among the many options available, three frameworks stand out for their widespread use and versatility: RICE, MoSCoW, and the 100 Point Method.
In this article, we’ll break down how these three frameworks work, when to use them, and how to choose the right one for your current situation. Whether you’re building out your next sprint, planning your product roadmap, or wrangling with stakeholder demands; this guide will help you prioritise with confidence.
Before comparing each of our three frameworks, let’s get clear on what each framework actually is and how they function. Each is designed to help teams make smarter decisions, faster. However, they each approach prioritisation from a different angle.
RICE is a prioritisation framework developed by Intercom that quantifies the potential value of a product initiative relative to the effort required to implement them. It helps allocate resources effectively by quantifying potential benefits and required investments, guiding strategic decisions towards initiatives with the highest value.
How it works:
The framework calculates a RICE score using the following four components:
1️⃣ Reach: An estimate of how many users or customers will be affected by the initiative within a defined time period.
2️⃣ Impact: A qualitative assessment of how much the initiative will influence user behaviour or business outcomes (typically scored on a scale, e.g., 3 = massive, 2 = high, 1 = medium).
3️⃣ Confidence: A self-assessed metric indicating the degree of certainty in the estimates provided for Reach and Impact, expressed as a percentage.
4️⃣ Effort: An estimate of the total time required from all team members, measured in person-days or weeks.
The resulting score enables teams to rank competing ideas based on their expected return on investment. It is particularly effective in roadmap planning where trade-offs must be justified with supporting rationale.
Ready to master the RICE Framework? Check out our full guide!
The MoSCoW Method is a prioritisation technique that categorises product requirements into Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have, ensuring essential features are delivered within constraints while maintaining flexibility for changing priorities and enhancing stakeholder satisfaction.
Rather than assigning numerical values, MoSCoW uses qualitative labels to determine priority:
1️⃣ Must-Have: Requirements that are non-negotiable for a release to be considered successful. Without them, the solution is unviable.
2️⃣ Should-Have: High-priority items that are important but not essential. Their absence may be inconvenient but not catastrophic.
3️⃣ Could-Have: Desirable but non-essential features that have minimal impact if omitted. Often considered for inclusion if time permits.
4️⃣ Won’t-Have (this time): Explicitly agreed to be out of scope for the current delivery timeframe but may be revisited in future iterations.
MoSCoW is especially useful in Agile environments and is frequently applied during release planning, sprint scoping, and stakeholder negotiations where clarity around delivery commitments is required.
Apply the MoSCoW Method with confidence! Check out our full guide!
.png)
The 100 Point Method, also known as the "100-Dollar Test" or "Cumulative Voting," is a democratic prioritisation tool that simplifies decision-making in product management. By allocating points, it quantifies preferences, promotes stakeholder participation, and ensures strategic alignment, making complex decisions manageable.
1️⃣ Each participant is allocated a total of 100 points, which they must distribute across a predefined set of items (e.g., features, initiatives, or epics) according to perceived value or urgency. The allocation can be done digitally or via physical means in workshop settings.
2️⃣ The aggregated point totals are then used to generate a prioritised list, reflecting the group’s shared preferences. Unlike models that rely on objective scoring criteria, the 100 Point Method is inherently subjective but democratic, making it effective for achieving alignment in cross-functional teams or when consensus-building is required.
This method is particularly suited for early-stage planning sessions, design sprints, or scenarios where stakeholder buy-in is critical and rapid decisions are necessary.
Ready to run your first 100 Point workshop? Check out our full guide!
As a Product Manager it’s vital to know that these frameworks aren’t mutually exclusive, nor are they perfect, but by understanding what each one offers, you’ll be better equipped to apply the right tool at the right time.
Not all prioritisation challenges are the same and as a result choosing the right prioritisation tool for your need isn’t just about preference, it’s about context, team dynamics, and decision complexity.
RICE excels when your goal is to maximise impact while minimising effort, especially in environments where product decisions are expected to be justifiable and transparent. It turns assumptions into structured inputs, so ideas can be evaluated side-by-side in a quantifiable way.
When this matters:
RICE is also useful in cross-functional prioritisation because it gives all teams (design, engineering, product, growth) a common scoring framework, reducing misalignment and abstract debates.
MoSCoW is your go-to when the release date is non-negotiable, or when your team has hard constraints on resources and needs a way to clearly define what’s in and what’s out. It doesn’t score ideas; it categorises them to enforce realistic scope management.
When this matters:
MoSCoW enables disciplined delivery in high-stakes or fast-moving environments where teams might otherwise over-promise and under-deliver. It also pairs well with Agile delivery, allowing sprint teams to adapt priorities within clear boundaries.
The 100 Point Method shines when you need input from multiple stakeholders and want a process that gives everyone a voice, but still forces tradeoffs. Each person is given exactly 100 points to "spend" across a list of ideas, ensuring no one can mark everything as top priority.
When this matters:
It’s particularly effective in early-stage planning, design sprints, or when working with stakeholders who have strong opinions but limited product understanding, they get to vote, but they also see the tradeoffs.
🪜 Pro Tip: While each framework has its strengths, some teams find success blending them. For example, using RICE to pre-score ideas, then applying MoSCoW to scope delivery within a sprint. Just remember: clarity beats complexity.
Let’s bring these frameworks to life with real-world product scenarios. Each case study shows how using the right tool at the right time leads to clearer decisions, better alignment, and smarter delivery.
It's the start of Q3 planning. Your team is sitting in a virtual room staring at a shared backlog filled with 25+ potential features. Slack pings are flying, stakeholders are asking for updates, and everyone has a different opinion on what should be prioritised. Some features are exciting moonshots, others are tech debt that engineering insists must get addressed. You're under pressure to justify every decision with data, not gut instinct.
This is where RICE shines.
You step back and walk the team through Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort; the noise begins to settle. Suddenly, you’re no longer just discussing ideas, you’re scoring them. What seemed unmanageable becomes methodical. RICE gives you a ranking, not a debate. You leave the meeting with an aligned, defensible roadmap, and your sanity intact.
You're two weeks from a hard launch date. The pressure is mounting, and the energy is electric (but chaotic). The team just came off a design sprint and you're now swimming in sticky notes, Loom walkthroughs, and feature suggestions. Everyone’s excited, but the list keeps growing. There’s a growing fear that you're trying to build too much, too fast. Deadlines are looming. Tension is creeping in.
MoSCoW becomes your lifeline.
You pull the team together and categorise everything into Must, Should, Could, and Won’t Have. Tension eases as clarity emerges. You're able to cut through the chaos and clearly define what’s absolutely necessary to launch, but also, what can wait. MoSCoW doesn’t just help you prioritise; it gives the whole team confidence to move fast without overreaching.
You’ve invited product, design, engineering, marketing, and support to a prioritisation workshop. The goal? Align on what comes next. The problem? Everyone walks in with a different agenda. Marketing wants feature X to support an upcoming campaign. Support wants to reduce ticket volume. Engineering wants to refactor part of the system that’s slowing everyone down. The conversation starts polite, but it's quickly veering into defensiveness.
You break out the 100 Point Method.
Instead of arguing, everyone gets to vote; 100 points to distribute however they want. There’s a quiet shift. The mood softens. People start listening to each other. When the results are in, there’s surprise, then nodding, for the first time, alignment emerges. The loudest voice doesn’t win. The best ideas do. You’ve turned debate into data, and disagreement into direction.
RICE and MoSCoW are among the most widely used, with RICE popular in data-driven environments and MoSCoW often used in Agile delivery and MVP scoping.
The RICE framework is best suited for maximising economic benefit because it considers both potential impact and the effort required, helping teams optimize for ROI.
Use the 100 Point Method when you want to involve a diverse group of stakeholders in prioritisation and need to uncover alignment or consensus across different perspectives.
Yes! Many teams combine them. For example, you might use RICE to score and rank ideas, then apply MoSCoW to categorise scope for a specific sprint or release.
MoSCoW is ideal for MVPs. It forces teams to focus on only what’s essential for a functional release, helping avoid scope creep and decision paralysis.
RICE can handle large lists (20–50+), while the 100 Point Method works best with 10–25 items. MoSCoW is ideal for short, scoped lists (e.g., MVP or sprint backlog).
MoSCoW is the simplest prioritisation framework to adopt, it doesn’t require much data and is easy for cross-functional teams to understand quickly.
Prioritisation is one of the most powerful tools in a Product Manager’s toolkit, and an incredible skill to be mastered over time. Prioritisation is not just for deciding what gets built, but for building alignment, focus, and momentum within a team. The RICE framework helps you weigh impact against effort with data. MoSCoW brings clarity when time and scope are tight. The 100 Point Method invites every voice to the table, making collaboration productive instead of political.
No single method is perfect. Each has strengths, and the best product teams know when to use them, but also when to blend them. Whether you’re building a roadmap, shipping an MVP, or navigating stakeholder priorities, what matters most is having a clear process that helps your team move forward with purpose.
So the next time you're staring down a packed backlog or a fast-approaching deadline, don’t just guess, prioritise with intent.
.png)
.png)
.png)