At Roadmunk, we know there's no shortage of great ideas within a product team. However, it’s not always easy to directly connect a great product idea to customer feedback—making it difficult to validate whether a product idea is worth taking a bet on.
With idea management in Roadmunk, you can quickly create and manage a backlog of collected or imported ideas that's rooted in real user needs. This is accomplished by linking feedback directly to your product ideas. Learn more about feedback management in Roadmunk here.
Plus: Roadmunk’s idea management capabilities help product teams surface high-impact ideas and promote them to the product roadmap. You can systematically prioritize product ideas using built-in prioritization templates—or create your own weighted scoring framework.
The video below will help you get up and running with idea management in Roadmunk.
Using built-in idea prioritization templates
Within Roadmunk, you immediately have access to two built-in prioritization templates: R.I.C.E. and Value vs. Effort. The R.I.C.E. and Value vs. Effort prioritization templates can help your product team implement a new standardized process for objectively surfacing what to focus on next.
Check out the video below for a high-level overview of these templates in Roadmunk, and keep reading for a more in-depth understanding of how each works.
The R.I.C.E. prioritization template
The R.I.C.E. prioritization template scores each idea against four factors: reach, impact, confidence and effort (hence the acronym R.I.C.E.). A R.I.C.E. score helps product managers quantify the estimated value of an idea.
Here's a breakdown of what each factor stands for and how they should be quantified in your in-app R.I.C.E. template:
Reach: The number of individual users or accounts an idea will affect within a given time period.
Impact: The impact an idea will have on individual users, using a scale of 1 to 5:
- 5 = massive impact
- 4 = high impact
- 3 = medium impact
- 2 = low impact
- 1 = minimal impact
Confidence: The product team’s confidence of impact and reach estimates. For example, how data exists to back up those numbers. Use a percent score to indicate:
- 100% = highly confident
- 75% = very confident
- 50% = moderately confident
- 25% = not very confident
Effort: The amount of time the idea will require from product, design and development, using a scale of 1 to 5:
- 5 = massive effort
- 4 = high effort
- 3 = medium effort
- 2 = low effort
- 1 = minimal effort
Once you’ve entered values for each R.I.C.E. factor, Roadmunk will generate a R.I.C.E. score using the following formula: (R × I × C) ÷ E
Then, you’ll be able to rank—from highest to lowest—your ideas using the R.I.C.E. score. Within Roadmunk, this is what the R.I.C.E. prioritization template looks like:
The ideas that bubble to the top are the ideas worth taking bets on. And, you can commit to making an idea happen by promoting your highest-ranking ideas to your roadmap. Learn more about roadmapping in Roadmunk here.
Value vs. Effort
Value vs. Effort is a simple prioritization template that involves taking your list of ideas and quantifying them using value and effort estimates.
This prioritization method generates healthy discussions with internal stakeholders—the C-level, the product team and the dev team, etc.—on what they believe value and effort means, which in turn helps product managers find any strategic alignment holes and fix them.
In Roadmunk, both value and effort can be quantified using a scale of 1 to 5.
Value:
- 5 = massive value
- 4 = high value
- 3 = medium value
- 2 = low value
- 1 = minimal value
Effort:
- 5 = massive effort
- 4 = high effort
- 3 = medium effort
- 2 = low effort
- 1 = minimal effort
Roadmunk will generate a score by dividing effort into value. Here's an example of the Value vs. Effort template looks like in Roadmunk:
Ideas can be ranked from highest to lowest score. From here, the ideas with the highest scores can be promoted to your product roadmap.
You can also create your own custom weighted scoring framework to prioritize ideas in Roadmunk. Click here for a custom weighted scoring setup guide.