Prioritizing app requests can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re managing demands from stakeholders, users and your team. Everyone has their own ideas about what’s most important – but without a clear plan, it’s easy to lose focus.
The good news is that with the right approach, you can create a process that balances user needs with what’s realistic for your team to deliver. In this blog, we’ll share simple prioritization techniques and explore how PlatformManager can make managing app requests a lot easier.
Why prioritization is hard
Prioritizing app requests means making tough decisions. Business leaders might focus on features that increase revenue, while users want tools that make their work easier. At the same time, developers need to think about time, resources and technical challenges that come from any development – that’s just a part of responsible app development.
Without a clear process, it’s easy to waste time on the wrong tasks or miss out on big opportunities. That’s why having a system to rank requests is so important – it keeps everyone on track and ensures the team is working on what matters most.
Helpful ways to prioritize
There are a wide variety of frameworks to help organize app requests, so to give you a quick taste, let’s look at two popular methods.
The MoSCoW Method
This framework sorts requests into four categories:
Must Have: Features that are critical to the app working
Should Have: Important but not essential right now
Could Have: Nice-to-have features that can wait
Won’t Have: Features that aren’t needed for now
The MoSCoW method is easy to use and great for communicating priorities to your team and stakeholders. However, it’s important to limit the “must have” category to really key projects, because a “must have” for one person isn’t necessarily one for the business.
RICE Scoring
The RICE method also helps prioritize tasks by scoring them in four categories:
Reach: How many users will this app impact?
Impact: How big will the benefit be?
Confidence: How sure are you about your estimates?
Effort: How much time and work will it take?
Once you calculate scores for each request, it’s easier to see which ones should come first. This method works well for teams that want to use data to make decisions.
Finding the right balance
What should be clear from that quick breakdown is that the most important things to consider when prioritizing app requests are impact and viability. Prioritizing app requests isn’t just about tackling the most exciting ideas first – it’s about making thoughtful decisions that balance user impact with what your team can realistically deliver. On one hand, you want to prioritize requests that solve significant problems or provide high value to your users. On the other hand, you need to consider the resources, time, and effort it will take to make those ideas a reality.
For example, a feature that users really want might also be hard to build. In such cases, it’s important to assess whether the effort is worth the payoff, or if it’s better to save that idea for later. The best outcomes come when user needs and technical feasibility are considered together, ensuring that the team’s work delivers maximum impact without becoming overwhelming.
How PlatformManager can help
While PlatformManager can’t make the decision of which BI app to develop (at least for now), it can make a huge difference once the development process has begun.
One key feature of PlatformManager is Data Lineage and its ability to provide clear insights into how changes to your data sources will impact your apps. That’s an immediate tick under the feasibility aspect.
It also helps your team avoid errors with version control, making it easier to track changes and maintain consistency during development – keeping effort as low as possible. By improving collaboration between developers and stakeholders, PlatformManager helps everyone stay aligned on goals and priorities throughout the app development process.
Want to roll out a suite of new BI apps or manage your existing ones better? PlatformManager is the ideal solution for any dev team that wants to work smarter and not harder. Get in touch with PlatformManager.