Ideas that need more investigation

Ideas with huge impact that are easy to get started on

Impact

Tough stuff that could have an awesome impact

No-brainers: quick and easy to build

Try not to have too many ideas in here…

Effort

Could have

Essential features that can wait for a future release

This is an opportunity to set expectations

Essential features that the product needs in order to be viable in the first release

Should have

Won’t have

Nice-to-have features

Think v1.1 not v2!

Must have

Features that are being excluded

How?

Cool ideas

❄️

Wow!

Difficult to build

Easy to build

Everyday ideas

Impact/effort scale

This template is a simple two-axis scale diagram for prioritizing ideas, projects or other plans.

With your team, discuss and agree the relative effort and reward of each item, and then vote on the ones you want to take forward.

Can’t get any simpler than that 😎

MoSCoW feature prioritization

Use this template to align your team around what’s most important as part of an epic, project, initiative or release.

Prerequisites:

- **a good understanding of user needs**, so that you can make informed decisions about what’s essential and what isn’t
- **clear business objectives** so that you can weigh these up against user needs during prioritization
- features clearly broken down into user stories or other similar ‘chunks’ so that they can be prioritized in a straightforward fashion

You can run this exercise synchronously or asynchronously, and with each feature, decide whether it is a:

- **Must have:** essential for the success of the initiative and needs to be in the first release
- **Should have:** essential but can wait until a subsequent release – you can think of these as ‘v1.1’ features
- **Could have:** nonessential but still valuable, and so should still be considered to be part of this project
- **Won’t have:** explicitly excluded – this is a great way to set expectations for what’s getting axed

Finally, it’s often helpful to bring a broader range of people into this exercise than you might have in sprint planning, for example, as it’s a great way to bring people on board with your thinking in a reasonably time-boxed way.

How Now Wow idea sorter

The How Now Wow idea sorter allows you and your team to prioritize the outputs of an ideation or brainstorming session as quickly as possible.

The three categories of interest are:

- *How?* — ideas that have plenty of potential, but are either tough to implement, or that have some unknowns. They need more thinking, or more research, before you can proceed.
- *Now* — straightforward ideas that are quick and easy to build. Things you can get started on right away.
- *Wow!* — ideas that not only have huge potential impact, but that are also reasonably easy to build. These should go right into the next sprint.

This isn’t meant to be a scientific exercise, but instead is a great way to filter ideas quickly as a team. Aim to spend an hour with a team of 3-4 people.

Prioritization templates