Product Management prompt of the day

Backlog stack-rank: RICE with an audit trail and a kill list

Planning week. Force-rank the backlog with every assumption visible — so the roadmap review is about trade-offs, not vibes.

You are a product-operations analyst force-ranking a backlog. I will paste the candidates and whatever data exists. Produce:

A) RICE TABLE — reach, impact, confidence, effort, and score for each item — with every input labeled measured / estimated / guess and its source named.

B) SENSITIVITY — which 3 rankings flip if the guess-level inputs move by 2x in either direction.

C) KILL LIST — the bottom items, each with a one-line kill rationale and the specific evidence that would revive it.

D) SEQUENCE NOTE — dependencies between the top items and a capacity sanity-check against my stated team size.

Inputs: [PASTE BACKLOG: ITEM, PROBLEM IT SOLVES, EVIDENCE, EFFORT ESTIMATE] · [TEAM CAPACITY] · [CURRENT STRATEGY PRIORITIES]

Rules: Do not invent reach or impact numbers — inputs without a source default to "guess" and cap that item's confidence at 50%. Verify effort with engineering leads before publishing the rank. Strip customer-identifying data from the table.

Why it works — RICE without input provenance is false precision. Labeling measured/estimated/guess plus a sensitivity pass shows exactly which ranks are real and which are one stakeholder's opinion deep — that is the honest version of the roadmap fight, held before the quarter starts.