How to Prioritize a Roadmap

There are two ubiquitous pieces of advice  on how to prioritize a product roadmap. Unfortunately, both are useless.

The first is to create a spreadsheet to list all your ideas, and score each one by how much it will cost to build and how much impact it will have. Then, sort them so that the ideas that have the most impact for the least effort show up at the top, like this:

There are a million variants of this framework, but none of them helps you with what is hard about prioritization: coming up with good ideas and accurately predicting what would happen if you decided to pursue them. When you’re filling out numbers in a spreadsheet, it can feel like a shot in the dark.

When asked how to deal with this problem, experienced product leaders will often proffer the second piece of ubiquitous-yet-useless advice, saying something along the lines of, “It’s more art than science” or, “Just go with your gut.”

Is there anything we can learn that helps us get better at prioritization?