How to prioritise UX decisions this year

Your backlog started reasonable. Then someone requested a feature. A bug came in, a stakeholder had an idea. Now you're sitting there looking at 40+ items and the only thing you know for certain is that you can't build all of them.

So you read about MoSCoW, RICE scoring, value-effort matrices, and Kano models to try to find a way to prioritise.

The problem is all these frameworks assume you have something you don't: time to score dozens of features across different dimensions, or the luxury of being wrong twice.

What you need is to ask one simple question ⬇️

What's stopping us from getting to the next stage?

❌ Not "what would be nice to have", "what did that competitor just ship", or "what would make our next investor update look impressive."

✅ What single thing is preventing your next inflection point?

Pre-PMF

Pre-product-market fit, the answer is usually harsh: people try your product once and leave. The bottleneck isn't more features. It's that users don't get the value fast enough, or the main flow confuses them, or (and this one hurts) you're solving a problem they don't actually have.

➡️ No amount of polish fixes validation problems. You need to talk to users, watch them use the product, understand where the disconnect is. Then fix that.

Early traction

Here, the game changes. Now users understand your value proposition, but they're not sticking around. Your bottleneck has moved to activation.

➡️ There are probably three specific moments in your signup-to-value journey where half your users disappear. Find those three friction points. Fix them in order of impact. Resist the urge to add anything new until your retention curve bends up.

Scaling

Scaling brings its own unique flavour of chaos. Different users want different things. Your team can't move as fast. Technical debt starts compounding interest.

➡️ Here, prioritisation doesn’t mean adding features – it’s more about protecting what already works while you standardise the experience enough to grow without breaking.

💍 The only rule that matters

If it doesn't directly address your current bottleneck, it goes in the "after we fix this" pile.

The hard part isn't choosing what to build. It's choosing what not to build yet.

How to make the call

1. Take your entire backlog. Write your current bottleneck at the top of a fresh document.
2. Now score every item with one criterion only: "Does this directly fix our bottleneck?"
3. Everything that gets a "no" goes into a separate list called "Later." Not "maybe." Not "let's circle back." You'll get to it when the current bottleneck is solved.
4. For everything left, rank by effort. Low-effort, high-impact items ship first. Anything high-effort gets interrogated: Is this really the simplest path to solving the problem, or are we overengineering because it's more interesting?
   

Identify the bottleneck, fix it faster than anyone expects, move to the next one. Repeat until you're profitable or funded or both.

Definitely not sexy, but it works.