Free Feature Prioritization Tool
Stop the "Everything is Important" debate. Force a ranked order in 60 seconds.
Drag-and-drop ranking • Anonymous responses • See disagreement scores
The Priority Inflation Problem
Every product backlog suffers from the same disease: priority inflation. When asked to prioritize, stakeholders label everything "P0" or "Must Have." Sales says every customer-requested feature is critical. Engineering claims every tech debt item is blocking progress. Leadership wants all strategic initiatives done simultaneously.
The result: roadmaps that promise everything and deliver nothing. Teams thrash between competing priorities, context-switching constantly. Projects drag on for months because nobody agreed upfront what actually matters most.
Traditional prioritization frameworks—RICE scores, MoSCoW method, value vs. effort matrices—fail because they don't force trade-offs. Everything gets a high score. Nothing gets eliminated. Teams still don't know what to build first.
Forced ranking eliminates this. When you can't label five things as "top priority," you have to choose. Drag them into order. What comes first? What comes second? What can wait? The discomfort is the point—it surfaces real priorities instead of polite agreement that everything matters equally.
Why This Beats RICE Scores and Spreadsheets
Product managers spend hours calculating RICE scores (Reach × Impact × Confidence / Effort). Stakeholders debate whether a feature scores 7.2 or 8.4 on impact. By the time you've filled out the spreadsheet, priorities have shifted and the exercise feels stale.
Traditional Frameworks
- ✗RICE scoring takes hours of data gathering
- ✗Stakeholders argue over score definitions
- ✗Multiple items get the same priority level
- ✗Nobody remembers the order a week later
Forced Ranking
- ✓Takes 1 minute per person to drag items
- ✓No debate over arbitrary numbers
- ✓Forces strict order—no ties allowed
- ✓Results show clear consensus or conflict
This tool cuts through the analysis paralysis. Instead of calculating scores, everyone ranks items by dragging them into order. The tool shows the average ranking—revealing what the team collectively believes should come first—plus a disagreement score highlighting where priorities conflict.
If sales ranks "Enterprise Dashboard" first but engineering ranks it last, that conflict surfaces immediately. You can address it before anyone writes code, not after months of misaligned work.
When to Use Forced Ranking
Product Roadmap Planning
When you have 10 features and capacity for 3 this quarter, force the team to rank them. The top 3 get built. The rest wait. No exceptions, no "we'll squeeze it in."
Bug Triage
When every bug feels critical, force ranking reveals what actually blocks customers vs. what annoys internal teams. Fix the highest-ranked issues first.
Budget Cuts
When asked to cut 30% from your budget, forced ranking makes the pain explicit. You can't cut everything equally—some initiatives die, others survive. Make it deliberate.
OKR Prioritization
When leadership proposes 5 objectives but you know only 2 will get real focus, rank them. The bottom 3 become "stretch goals" that nobody feels guilty about ignoring.
Technical Debt Backlog
Engineering teams accumulate hundreds of tech debt items. Force rank the top 10 candidates so you can allocate fix-it time to what actually matters for velocity and stability.
Customer Request Triage
When sales brings 20 "must-have" customer requests, forced ranking reveals which customers represent strategic value vs. one-off edge cases you can't afford to build for.
Ready to Force Real Prioritization?
Add your items, share the link, and see what your team actually thinks should come first.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you prioritize a product roadmap?
Effective roadmap prioritization requires forcing trade-offs, not just scoring features. List your candidate features (2-10 items), have key stakeholders rank them from "build first" to "can wait," and review the average ranking plus disagreement scores. High disagreement indicates misalignment on strategy that needs discussion before building anything. Tools like RICE are useful for analysis, but forced ranking cuts through endless debate and creates a definitive order.
What's the difference between RICE scoring and forced ranking?
RICE scoring (Reach × Impact × Confidence / Effort) produces numeric scores that can tie or cluster closely together, leaving final prioritization ambiguous. Forced ranking eliminates ties entirely—every item has a distinct position. RICE works well for initial filtering, but when you need a definitive order for execution, forced ranking provides clarity that scores cannot. Additionally, forced ranking takes minutes while RICE requires hours of data collection and debate over scoring criteria.
What are free alternatives to Jira prioritization?
Jira's prioritization requires manual dragging of hundreds of tickets or custom fields that nobody maintains consistently. Lightweight alternatives include forced ranking tools (like this one), voting tools with limited votes to force choices, or simple spreadsheets where stakeholders rank items 1-N. The key is separating prioritization from implementation tracking—Jira is for tracking work, not for making strategic priority decisions with stakeholders who don't use Jira daily.
Can people rank items the same (ties)?
No. The tool enforces strict ranking—no ties allowed. This constraint is intentional. When ties are permitted, everyone ranks everything as "high priority" and you're back to square one. Forcing people to choose between two items they think are equally important reveals true priorities. The discomfort of choosing is the point—it makes priority decisions explicit rather than allowing everything to stay vaguely important.
What does the disagreement score mean?
The disagreement score (based on standard deviation of rankings) shows where stakeholders fundamentally disagree on priorities. Low disagreement means everyone ranked an item similarly. High disagreement means some people ranked it first while others ranked it last—signaling misalignment that needs discussion before proceeding. Items with high disagreement often represent strategic conflicts (like short-term revenue vs. long-term platform work) that won't resolve through more data—they require explicit trade-off decisions from leadership.
How many items can I rank?
You can rank between 2 and 10 items. This constraint is intentional—forcing people to rank more than 10 items becomes cognitively overwhelming and produces unreliable results. If you have more than 10 candidates, do an initial filter to identify the top 10, then run forced ranking to get the final order. Breaking prioritization into rounds (filtering, then ranking) produces better decisions than trying to rank 30 items at once.
Do I need to create an account?
No. The forced ranking tool is completely free and requires no signup. Add your items, get a shareable link, have your team rank them by dragging into order, and view results immediately. Sessions are temporary and disposable—use it for every roadmap planning session, bug triage, or budget prioritization discussion without any friction.