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Product Management vocabulary · Prioritization

Prioritize

Meaning in product management, with examples

/praɪˈɔːrətaɪz/verbCore term

In product management, prioritize means: To decide which work is most important and should be done first, and therefore which work will wait or will not be done at all.

In Turkish: önceliklendirmek, öncelik sırasına koymak, öne almak

How it is used

Probably the core skill of a PM. You prioritize features, the backlog or requests, often with frameworks such as RICE or MoSCoW. The noun is prioritization. Hearing “everything is a priority” usually means no real prioritization has happened.

Example sentences

  1. We need to prioritize the checkout bugs over the new dashboard.

  2. How did you prioritize these ten requests from sales?

Common collocations

  • prioritize the backlog
  • prioritize ruthlessly
  • prioritize by impact
  • prioritization framework
  • backlogAn ordered list of all the work a product team might do, such as features, improvements and bug fixes, with the most important items at the top.
  • RICEA prioritization method that gives each idea a score based on Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort, so that very different ideas can be compared.
  • MoSCoW methodA prioritization method that sorts requirements into four groups: Must have, Should have, Could have and Won't have (this time).
  • trade-offA situation in which getting more of one thing means accepting less of another, such as releasing faster but with fewer features.
  • triageTo review incoming bugs, requests or issues quickly and sort them by urgency and importance, deciding which to handle now, later or not at all.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Prioritization

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