Most product management frameworks are not useful and many are harmful for startups.
I was the CTO & VP of Product for a cybersecurity startup for 10 years and dove into frameworks to "fix" our prioritization problem.
RICE, Kano, MoSCoW, etc. sound good on paper. They ask you how much effort it will take, if it's a must have, etc.
Frameworks fail most startups for 3 reasons:
1. Many founders and product people fall into the trap of "you just need to prioritize all the ideas". But that's the wrong place to start.
You need a product strategy.
One that is informed by your company strategy.
Which states who you are building for and what your company's goals need to inform the product strategy.
If you just start out with a bunch of things you can do it's as good as shooting blind and hoping you hit the right target.
2. Just like a dev backlog no one looks at, they become a dumping ground of everyone's ideas. Once word gets out that there's a prioritization list everyone has an idea.
Not that ideas are bad, but as I told my former CEO. It's not that we don't have enough ideas, it's that we have too many.
A long list of everything you could do is worthless.
Ideas are built on today's knowledge and context. But that will change in a month or a year. So all those ideas are stale and lack today's context.
That's an awful place to prioritize work from.
3. And just like strategy you shouldn't do prioritization work without also considering Marketing and Sales.
Wonderful products lose all the time because they can't reach who they're intended to sell to.
Marketing and Sales has to help inform the product strategy. Product need to be tightly aligned with them for success.
But most frameworks ignore this or the right voices don't get to weigh in.
There are places where frameworks make sense.
If your strategy is to add more integrations. Something akin to RICE might be perfect to figure out which integrations to do first.
Or if your team is given the job to fix customer bugs. A framework might help.
But so would talking to customer success and asking them what causes them the biggest headache or looking at customer support tickets and finding the biggest causes.
What about when you have your company strategy?
And that strategy is actionable?
Then go find all the customer and stakeholder feedback and your customer interviews and coalesce that into actionable ideas.
Then sit down with marketing and sales and other stakeholders and prioritize as your resource allocation and strategy dictates.
Then maybe a framework could help. But again CS, Support, Sales, Marketing looking at that list might be able to just spot what order matters.
But a framework does help "organize" the argument. It visibly shows you tradeoffs which is nice.
In short, it's about having your ducks in a row before you pull out a framework.
Does your company have a strategy?
Do you have resource allocation figured out?
Is Product aligned with Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Support?
Do you actually understand your target customers?
If yes to the above, great, bring in a framework to help you figure out what will move the needle.
But you might not even need one.