5.10 Prioritization
At a Glance
Other names Innovation Games · Preference Games
In Brief
Prioritization games are structured exercises that force participants to make trade-offs between features, capabilities, or product attributes. By introducing constraints — limited budgets, forced rankings, or spatial metaphors — these games bypass the tendency to call everything “important” and reveal what people value most when they cannot have it all.
Common Use Case
You have a backlog of candidate features and need to decide what to build first. You convene a small group of target participants (typically 4–8) for a 60–90 minute session and run a prioritization game to force trade-offs that surveys can’t capture. The output is a ranked list plus the reasoning participants used to rank — which is the part that informs product decisions.
Helps Answer
- Which features do customers value most?
- What should we build first?
- Where are the biggest pain points in our current product?
- Which capabilities do customers consider must-haves versus nice-to-haves?
- What words do customers use to describe value?
- Are there features customers would pool resources to obtain?
Description
Prioritization games work because constraints force a choice. When a participant can only pick 5 features out of 20, or has only $100 of play money to distribute across 15 options, they must make the same kind of trade-offs they make with real purchasing decisions. This produces a stronger preference signal than asking people to rate features on a 1-to-5 scale, where the answers tend to cluster at the high end — though it remains stated-preference data from a small group, not statistically representative measurement. The conversations that emerge during gameplay are often more useful than the final rankings, because the reasoning behind a choice is what transfers to product decisions. For a measurement that scales, use conjoint analysis (which estimates the value of each feature from choices between bundled options) or MaxDiff (a forced best/worst ranking across many items).
Three of the four games here (Buy a Feature, Product Box, Speed Boat) come from Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games; card sorting comes from the broader information-architecture and UX-research tradition. Like all stated-preference methods, the signal is sensitive to who is in the room and who speaks first. Facilitation matters, and each game carries its own group-dynamics risks — anchoring, dominant voices, social-desirability bias — that the individual method pages address.
These methods assume you have already validated that demand exists for your product category. They answer “what should we build?” not “should we build it?” For market-level research on which problems matter most, see Pain Point Sorting. For internal team-side scoring frameworks (RICE, ICE, MoSCoW, Kano), this page is the wrong tool — those rank options using team estimates, not customer behavior.
Choosing the Right Prioritization Game
Each game uses a different constraint to force trade-offs. Pick the one that matches the decision you need to make and the group size you can convene. Two or three sessions per game produce stronger signal than one.
- Buy a Feature Participants spend a fixed pot of play money across priced features, forcing trade-offs and group negotiation over what to fund. Best used when you need to see what people will pay for and how they reason about cost.
- Card Sorting Participants rank a known list of feature cards to show what they value and in what order. Best used as a first session when you have a defined backlog and need a fast, low-prep ranking.
- Product Box Participants design the packaging for their ideal product, surfacing the features they wish for and the words they use to describe value. Best used when you need to discover features and messaging you might not have thought of.
- Speed Boat Participants mark pain points as “anchors” slowing a boat, a visual metaphor that makes negative feedback easy to give. Best used when you need to surface frustrations before deciding what to fix or remove.
