How I Prioritise as a Product Owner

One of the most common questions aspiring Product Managers ask is which prioritisation framework they should use.

RICE, MoSCoW, ICE, Kano and countless others all promise a structured way to make decisions. While frameworks are useful, I have found that prioritisation is less about scoring ideas and more about making trade-offs.

Resources are always limited. Time is limited. Engineering bandwidth is limited. User attention is limited.

The real challenge is deciding where to focus and what to consciously ignore.

Over time, I have found myself relying heavily on the CIRCLES Method because it forces me to think from the user's perspective before jumping into solutions.

Why Prioritisation Matters

Every product team has more ideas than they can realistically execute.

Stakeholders have requests.

Customers have suggestions.

Competitors launch new features.

Internal teams propose improvements.

Without a structured approach, prioritisation often becomes reactive. The loudest voice wins, the most recent request gets attention, or teams end up building features without understanding the underlying problem.

Good prioritisation creates focus.

It ensures that the team spends time solving the most valuable problems instead of simply shipping the largest number of features.

The CIRCLES Method

The CIRCLES Method, developed by Lewis C. Lin, is commonly used in product management interviews, but I find it equally useful in real-world product thinking.

The framework encourages structured decision-making through seven steps:

• Comprehend the situation.
• Identify the customer.
• Report customer needs.
• Cut through prioritisation.
• List solutions.
• Evaluate trade-offs.
• Summarise recommendations.

What I particularly like about this framework is that prioritisation happens after understanding users and their needs.

Many teams start with solutions.

The CIRCLES Method starts with problems.

Start With the User

Before discussing features, I try to understand who is experiencing the problem.

Different user groups often have very different priorities.

A power user may request advanced functionality while a new user struggles with basic onboarding. Both requests may be valid, but their impact on overall business outcomes can be dramatically different.

Understanding the customer segment helps create context for every prioritisation decision.

Without context, every request appears equally important.

Prioritise Problems, Not Features

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that users rarely ask for exactly what they need.

They describe solutions.

Product teams need to uncover the underlying problem.

For example, a customer may request additional filters in a marketplace. The real issue might be that they cannot discover products efficiently.

Once the actual problem is understood, multiple solutions become available.

This prevents teams from locking themselves into a feature request before fully understanding the opportunity.

Balancing Impact and Effort

After identifying user needs, I evaluate opportunities using three simple questions:

• How significant is the user problem?
• How many users are affected?
• How difficult is the solution to implement?

Features that solve high-impact problems for a large number of users with reasonable effort naturally move higher in priority.

This is where trade-offs become visible.

Every feature consumes resources that could have been invested elsewhere.

Every feature we choose to build represents several features we choose not to build.

Prioritisation is fundamentally about opportunity cost.

Beware of the Loudest Voice

One of the easiest traps for product teams is confusing frequency with importance.

The most requested feature is not always the most valuable feature.

Similarly, the opinion of the most senior stakeholder is not always the best indicator of user needs.

Frameworks help create objectivity.

They encourage teams to evaluate opportunities using evidence rather than emotion.

Customer research, analytics, behavioural data and business objectives should guide decisions more than individual opinions.

Communicating Trade-Offs

Prioritisation is not only about making decisions.

It is also about explaining them.

People are more likely to support decisions when they understand the reasoning behind them.

The CIRCLES Method helps here because it creates a clear narrative.

You can explain:

• Who the customer is.
• What problem they face.
• Why that problem matters.
• Which solution best addresses it.
• What trade-offs were considered.

Good communication turns prioritisation from a debate into a discussion.

Final Thoughts

Many people view prioritisation as a scoring exercise.

I see it as a decision-making exercise.

Frameworks such as CIRCLES provide structure, but they do not make decisions for you. They simply make the trade-offs visible.

The best product teams are not the ones that build the most features. They are the ones that consistently focus on the problems that matter most.

Prioritisation is ultimately the discipline of saying no to good ideas so that great ideas have a chance to succeed.