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Weighted scoring prioritization Definition
Weighted scoring prioritization uses in numerical scoring to rank our strategic initiatives against benefit and cost categories.
It is helpful for product teams looking for objective prioritization techniques that factor in multiple layers of data.
And weighted scoring is the prioritization framework designs to help us decide how to prioritize features and other initiatives on our product roadmap.
With its framework, initiatives are scored according to standard criteria on a cost-versus-benefits basis and then ranked by their final scores.
The weighted scoring approach aims to derive an objective, quantitative business value for each competing item on your list. We can use those values to determine which items must prioritize on our roadmaps.
How is Weighted Scoring uses?
- The weighted scoring model is instrumental in product management, but its utility is not limited to this field.
- For example, if the company wanted to select the right piece of capital equipment among several choices.
- It creates a standard set of metrics—the combination of both benefits and costs—to score each piece of the type of equipment.
- The “weighted” feature comes from the fact that the company will deem specific criteria more important than others and, therefore, give those criteria a higher potential portion of the overall score.
- In continuing with these examples, the company might assign more “weight” to the complexity and time to implement the given piece of equipment than it transfers to the cost of buying it.
- A more straightforward example of weighted scoring—one many of us are familiar with—uses it on school tests.
- And teachers who deem the essay portion of the exams extra critical than multiple-choice sections. It gives those essays a more significant percentage of the student’s overall grades than their multiple-choice answers.
- And also its using this same thinking, students who take both the small quiz and a final exam. It approaching soon in the same class will intuitively give more attention to preparing for the last. They understand the final exam takes a greater weight on the overall grade in the study.
How the Product Managers use Weighted Scoring?
- In the product context, weighted scoring prioritization works as follows.
Step 1:
- It compiles the list of the features and other initiatives under consideration.
Step 2:
- Devise the list of criteria, including both costs and benefits, on which it’s scoring each of these initiatives.
- The screenshot here shows a team’s example using six scoring criteria—three costs, three benefits—to rank five competing product initiatives’ relative strategic value.
Step 3:
- It determines the respective weights of each criterion we are using to evaluate our competing initiatives.
- For example, let’s determine that the benefit “Increase Revenue” it must weighted more heavily in the overall score than the cost “Implementation Effort.”
- Then we want to assign a more significant percentage of the overall score to Increase Revenue.
Step 4:
- Assign individual scores for each potential feature and initiative across all of our cost-and-benefit metrics, and then calculate these overall scores to determine how to rank our list of items.
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