Our product team is paralyzed by competing requests – sales wants enterprise features, support begs for UX improvements, and engineering is pushing infrastructure upgrades. We tried implementing a weighted scoring model, but stakeholders keep gaming the system by inflating their priority numbers. Has anyone made objective scoring actually work in practice? Would love to see anonymized examples of how veterans handled similar situations.
weighted scoring is corporate theater. execs will override it the moment their pet project scores low. seen it 12 times across 3 companies. only real fix? bake an ‘executive override tax’ into your model – if they skip the queue, automatically add 20% to all other timelines.
we use a 10pt scale for impact/effort! but poeple just give everything 10s lol. maybe try capping scores per category?
Effective scoring requires constraint-based calibration. At Amazon, we mandated that only 15% of initiatives could score above 8/10 in strategic alignment. Forced stakeholders to make tough calls upfront. Combined this with quarterly ‘amnesty meetings’ to rebalance based on new data. Key is enforcing ruthless consistency.
2023 Pendo benchmark data shows teams using forced ranking (vs absolute scores) reduce priority conflicts by 41%. Instead of scoring individual features, have stakeholders rank their top 5 initiatives. Apply Borda count method to surface true priorities while minimizing gaming.