Every product manager has been there: staring at a backlog of a hundred items, trying to decide which five should be built next quarter. The instinct is to reach for a prioritisation framework. RICE, WSJF, ICE, MoSCoW: the product management toolbox is full of acronyms designed to bring order to this chaos. But what if the frameworks themselves are part of the problem?

At PR_D_CT DAY 2025 in Louvain-la-Neuve, Mathieu Thys from dualoop delivered a talk that challenged one of the most deeply held beliefs in the product management profession: that prioritisation is the core skill that separates good product managers from great ones. His argument, refined through years of consulting with Belgian and European product teams, is that prioritisation is often a symptom of a more fundamental failure upstream.

The talk struck a nerve with the audience. For a community that spends enormous energy debating the merits of different prioritisation approaches, being told that the entire exercise might be misguided was both uncomfortable and liberating.

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Original Presentation Slides

Download the slides from this talk as presented at the gathering.

What to Do Instead of Prioritising

Mathieu's talk is not nihilistic. He does not argue that product teams should abandon all structure and build whatever feels right. Instead, he proposes a shift in where teams invest their energy: away from sophisticated prioritisation and toward three upstream practices that make prioritisation largely unnecessary.

Strategic filtering before prioritisation

Mathieu describes a Belgian fintech company he advised that reduced its backlog from four hundred items to forty by applying a single strategic filter: does this item serve one of our three declared strategic bets for this year? Items that did not pass the filter were not deprioritised. They were removed entirely. The result: the remaining forty items were so clearly aligned to strategy that prioritisation among them was almost trivial.

The second practice he recommends is regular backlog purging. Every quarter, the product team should archive every item in the backlog that has not been discussed in the past six weeks. If it is truly important, it will come back. If it does not come back, it was never important enough to build. This practice is emotionally difficult because it requires letting go of ideas, but Mathieu argues it is the single most impactful practice for product team health.

The third practice is problem-based intake. Rather than allowing features and solutions to enter the backlog directly, teams should require every new item to be framed as a customer problem with supporting evidence. This dramatically reduces the volume of items because it is easy to suggest a feature but harder to document a validated problem. It also enables more meaningful comparison because problems can be evaluated on severity, frequency, and strategic relevance.

lightbulbPrioritisation as a last resort

In Mathieu's framework, prioritisation should only happen among a small set of well-validated, strategically aligned problems. If your prioritisation exercise involves more than fifteen items, you have not done enough upstream work. Go back to filtering before you reach for the scoring model.

The Prioritisation Fallacy

Original Presentation Slides

Why Prioritisation Frameworks Fail

The Upstream Problems That Prioritisation Cannot Solve

warningThe backlog is not a commitment list

What to Do Instead of Prioritising

Strategic filtering before prioritisation

lightbulbPrioritisation as a last resort

Implementing the Shift in Your Team

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Key Takeaways

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