When Everyone’s Right: Prioritization with the Product Quad

Product prioritization isn’t hard because people disagree—it’s hard because everyone’s right. The Product Quad—product manager, tech lead, UX designer, and product marketing manager—each brings a valid, but partial, view of the work. Business value, tech feasibility, user experience, and market demand all matter. And that’s where most frameworks fall apart.

This post breaks down how the Quad approaches trade-offs, how the IDEAS method brings structure to the chaos, and why prioritization isn’t a spreadsheet—it’s a conversation.

Prioritization is easy until you ask someone else.

• The product manager thinks a feature is a must-have to hit the strategic goal.

• The tech lead sees it as a month of unpaid infrastructure pain.

• The UX designer warns that it will confuse users and create support tickets.

• And the product marketing manager shrugs and says, “I can’t sell it.”

Guess what? They’re all right.

Welcome to prioritization inside the Product Quad.

Why Simple Frameworks Fall Apart

Sure, you’ve seen the frameworks—MoSCoW, RICE, ICE, all the acronyms. They give the illusion of rigor. But they fail to reflect the real-world complexity of product decisions.

A spreadsheet can’t weigh:

• A legacy integration that’s a tech landmine

• A new buyer persona we’ve never sold to

• A UX paradigm shift that affects three other workflows

• A strategic promise your CPO made to a lighthouse customer last quarter

These aren’t numbers. They’re judgment calls. Which is why you need the Quad.

The Four Angles of Every Decision

The Quad forces you to see each idea from four different altitudes:

• Product manager: Does it align with the product strategy? Does it support our business goals?

• Product marketing manager: Is there a clear market need? Can we position it? DO we know how to market and sell to this buyer?

• UX: Will this create friction? Does it serve real user needs?

• Tech: Can we build this efficiently? What’s the risk to quality, speed, or architecture?

When everyone has a say, you get the full picture. The problem is, the full picture rarely points to a single, obvious answer.

This is where the IDEAS framework can shine.

• Impact

• Dissatisfaction

• Evidence

• Advantage

• Strategic

It doesn’t pretend to give you an exact score. But it gives you the structure to have the right conversation—across roles, not in silos.

Impact of the Problem. How significantly does the problem affect your customers’ business operations, outcomes, or success? This is from the customer's perspective: does this problem slow them down, cost them money, damage their reputation, or put their own goals at risk?

Dissatisfaction. How unhappy or frustrated are customers with the current workaround, solution, or lack thereof? This helps you gauge urgency: mild irritation? Or actively looking for alternatives?

Evidence. How widespread or well-documented the problem is. Score high when you have real data: multiple customers reporting the issue, usage data, or patterns across segments. A score of zero means you’re running on opinion, not evidence.

Advantage to us. The benefit to your business if you solve this problem. This includes revenue potential, cost reduction, strategic positioning, or leverage for future capabilities. It’s the business case behind the idea.

Strategic Alignment. How well does the idea align with your current or future strategic priorities? High scores mean it directly supports long-term goals, target markets, or differentiators—even if the short-term impact is modest.

Finally, the Effort to Deliver profiles the complexity in terms of design and development, marketing, sales, and support teams. It embraces the logic that if two things are roughly the same, work on the easier one first, so this format skews in favor of the easy stuff.

Define your Rating Method to provide guidance to the team when scoring items. Some teams use a simple 1-5 scoring; others prefer the Fibonacci sequence of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on (each value is the sum of the prior two values).

What Real Prioritization Sounds Like

“The impact is high if we can land this new buyer segment. But it has major tech dependencies we’ve never scoped. There’s a simpler alternative that doesn’t wow but gets us partway—and we already have internal support for it. So let’s do the alternative now and stage the bigger version later.”

That’s not just prioritization. That’s strategy. And it only happens when the whole Quad contributes.

The Trap to Avoid

Don’t fall into the trap of “collaborative prioritization” where no one makes a decision and everyone blames the spreadsheet. The Quad informs. The product manager still decides.

But without the Quad, you’re choosing based on a fraction of the available insight—and hoping the rest doesn’t blow up later.

Final Word

Prioritization in product isn’t math. It’s a guided conversation.

The Product Quad gives you the people you need to have that conversation well before you commit, before you build, and long before you launch something no one wants, that doesn’t work, and can’t be sold.

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To provide context for the prioritization conversations, you know you should be listening to the market. Where should you begin? Find out by getting our free ebook, "Customer Interviews: A Field Guide."