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.

Reach > Product

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.