Happy Friday,

Last night I took my kids to the nearby theme park for their fall festival. "On a school night?" Stop shouting! Sure, we could have gone this weekend with everyone, but this way, there were no lines for any rides or anything the kids wanted to do.

The bottom line is, I'm kinda tired today, so I'm going to prioritize popular prioritization techniques. If you'd like to read up on these and a lot more techniques, you can read up on a lot of methods here.

Enjoy this very accurate and serious list.

10. KANO Method

KANO is a model that nobody uses to prioritize work. It asks that you understand and categorize work by knowing if it is essential, delightful, or one of another categories, and then prioritize by making sure there is an adequate mix.

9. RICE Score

RICE stands for Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. This is a technique people talk about during job interviews, but it is rarely seen in practice. It involves making up numbers for each of these categories, plugging them into a formula, and then looking at the score.

8. Buy a Feature

A popular technique in agile kickoffs and workshops, this involves laying out features to build and giving folks a budget of fake money to "Buy" features. Don't worry, once this exercise is done, the results are discarded and everything is reprioritized.

7. Effort/Impact (Magic Quadrants)

The classic magic quadrant of mapping ideas and features along an axis of effort and another of impact. This helps folks quickly see that the boring ideas are quick wins and the really cool stuff is too hard.

6. Cost of Delay

Popularized in SAFe, cost of delay asks that you not look at simple things like how much you'd make and how long it'd take. It asks that you look at how much you'd lose by not doing something today. This method requires someone to know how much worth there is to an idea or how long it would take, so this technique is impossible.

5. Impact Mapping

Impact mapping is great, but nobody has heard of it. It's a structured mind map that walks you through goals, who is involved, what behavior changes are required, and the work to make those changes happen. Unfortunately, this doesn't care about someone's pet features, so it is not viable in any serious place of business.

4. User Story Mapping

User Story Mapping is a great way to spend a day with folks imagining customers, their imaginary problems, and then inventing a series of steps to solve that problem. When you're done, you have walls covered in sticky notes and no idea where to begin, and more work than you'll ever finish.

3. MoSCoW

When you need to get things moving quickly but seem like you have a method, you can use MoSCoW. You categorize work as Must, Should, Could, and Won't. This method is popular because it lets people feel good about shoving all their work in the "Must" category, and putting things like security in the "Won't".

2. Business Value

Business value is two words that are put together when you need to say, "Because I said so," but not seem like a child. Consultants realized that you can make this seem more formal by assigning an arbitrary number to this, and then you have a battle-hardened prioritization technique. Don't ask what the numbers or what business value means, or you'll be asked to "Take it offline."

1. HiPPO

Could there be a simpler or more elegant method than HiPPO? I bet you can't find one. This method involves saying "Yes" to every request and ordering them by the title of the person who requested it. By my estimation, this is the most widely used industry standard. Are there better alternatives? Nobody knows.

Sincerely,

Ryan