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Why The Impact Effort Prioritization Matrix Doesn't Work

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The Impact/Effort prioritization matrix is a staple of product management — it’s simple, easy to understand and ubiquitous. You probably already have these two column in your product backlog or idea bank): Effort can be stated in person/weeks or simply has high/medium/low. Impact can be graded on a scale, for example 1–5, 5 being the highest, or again as high/medium/low. Once you have the numbers in place, it’s a matter of picking the features that give you the best bang for the buck. But that’s where things get a little bit tricky. To see why let’s plot the tasks the Effort/Impact axis: It’s pretty clear that the top-most project on the left is better than everything else, definitely those ones on the bottom right, but how do all the other ones compare? Luckily there’s a solution at hand. You may be familiar with this model — The Impact/Effort Prioritization Matrix. Googling it will give you thousands of results and many variations — this is kind of an industry best practice. As with

The Impact/Effort prioritization matrix is a staple of product management — it’s simple, easy to understand and ubiquitous. You probably already have these two column in your product backlog or idea bank): Effort can be stated in person/weeks or simply has high/medium/low. Impact can be graded on a scale, for example 1–5, 5 being the highest, or again as high/medium/low. Once you have the numbers in place, it’s a matter of picking the features that give you the best bang for the buck. But that’s where things get a little bit tricky. To see why let’s plot the tasks the Effort/Impact axis: It’s

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