Improve prioritization with custom opportunity scoring

Prioritization in TheyDo helps you decide where to focus and how to invest. With Custom Prioritization, you can define your own scoring models to evaluate both Opportunities and Solutions.

Instead of relying on a fixed framework, you can tailor scoring to match your organization’s goals, metrics, and way of working. This makes it easier to align teams and scale decision-making across projects.

Custom scoring for Opportunities and Solutions

With Custom Prioritization, you can configure scoring models for both Opportunities and Solutions.

You can extend the standard scoring setup by adding drivers for customer and business value, or create a completely custom model that reflects your organization’s goals and metrics.

Scoring Opportunities: which problems to solve

Opportunities represent the problems and unmet needs you’ve identified across customer journeys.

Scoring Opportunities helps you decide where to focus first. Which problems affect the most customers? Which have the biggest impact? Which align most strongly with your business goals?

Most Opportunity scoring models focus on value and impact.

Scoring Solutions: which investments to make

Solutions represent the initiatives, features, or changes you’re considering to address one or more Opportunities.

Scoring Solutions helps you decide how to act. Which solution is feasible? Which delivers the most value for the effort required? How confident are you in the expected outcome?

Most Solution scoring models focus on feasibility, effort, and expected return.

Key features

• Define your own scores
  Create input scores with clear descriptions. You can configure separate scoring models for Opportunities and Solutions, or use the same setup across both. In most cases, we recommend keeping them separate to reflect the difference between evaluating problems and evaluating solutions.

• Flexible inputs
  Use numeric scales such as 1–5 or 1–10, percentages, or custom metrics like revenue or active users. Any numeric input can be included in your scoring model.

• Computed scores
  Combine inputs using formulas and weights to calculate composite scores. This allows you to implement frameworks like RICE, ICE, or your own custom model.

• Matrix view
  Visualize scored Opportunities or Solutions on a 2D matrix to identify quick wins, strategic investments, or lower-priority items.

• Standardization across teams
  Align on one scoring method to create consistency across teams and projects.

How custom prioritization works

For Opportunities

Opportunities help you identify and prioritize areas for improvement across your customer journeys. They represent the problems worth solving.

Before scoring, make sure your Opportunities are clearly defined:

• Start with “How might we…”

• Focus on root causes rather than solutions

• Keep them broad enough to allow multiple approaches

• Avoid duplicates

Clear Opportunities lead to more meaningful prioritization.

For Solutions

Solutions represent the initiatives or changes you’re considering to address one or more Opportunities.

Scoring Solutions separately allows you to evaluate feasibility and expected return without confusing it with problem importance.

A high-priority Opportunity may have multiple potential Solutions, each with different effort, risk, and impact. Scoring them independently helps teams make more informed investment decisions.

Design principles for effective scoring

Keep your scoring model simple. Start with a small number of meaningful inputs and refine over time. Most teams begin with 2–4 input scores and expand only when needed.

Focus on value before effort. For Opportunities, prioritize importance and impact. For Solutions, consider feasibility and expected return. Effort can be estimated at a high level first and refined later.

Score Opportunities and Solutions separately. This helps avoid confusing “this is a big problem” with “this is an easy solution.”

Align on one shared scoring method across teams. A consistent approach improves clarity and collaboration.

Setting up custom prioritization

Custom Prioritization is configured by Admins.

We recommend defining your scoring model during onboarding so teams start aligned from day one. Involve key stakeholders when designing the model to ensure the criteria reflect how decisions are made in your organization.

When setting up your scoring framework:

• Agree on how Opportunities will be scored

• Define a separate model for Solutions, if needed

• Clearly document input definitions and formulas in your team playbook

Once configured, teams can begin scoring and using the matrix to visualize priorities.

Supported scoring frameworks

TheyDo supports any formula-based prioritization framework as long as inputs are numeric (1–N scales) and the output is computable via arithmetic and weights. This covers the vast majority of frameworks teams use in practice.

Partially supported (with workarounds)

Some frameworks rely on categorical outputs rather than numeric formulas. These can often be approximated using numeric inputs and interpreted visually in the matrix.

Examples of scoring setups

Below are common ways teams configure scoring in TheyDo. You can use these as inspiration or adapt them to match your organization’s decision-making process.

Opportunity scoring: Value drivers

Many teams define separate drivers for customer value and business value to reduce interpretation differences.

Customer value might include:

• Improve customer experience

• Number of customers impacted

• Increase brand equity

Business value might include:

• Increase efficiency

• Increase revenue

These inputs can be weighted and combined into composite scores, then visualized in the Opportunity matrix to highlight problems with both strong customer and business impact.

Opportunity scoring: RICE method

RICE can be applied to Opportunities by defining four input scores:

• Reach: Percentage of customers affected

• Impact: Expected effect if the Opportunity is addressed

• Confidence: How certain you are about the estimates

• Effort: Estimated resources and time required

You can combine Reach, Impact, and Confidence into a value score and plot it against Effort in the Opportunity matrix to identify high-impact, manageable problems.

Opportunity scoring: Kano model

Use the Kano model to evaluate Opportunities based on customer satisfaction and functionality:

• Customer Satisfaction: Scale from Frustrated (−2) to Delighted (2)

• Functionality: Scale from None (−2) to Best (2)

Plot these scores on the matrix to distinguish between must-have and delight attributes.

Solution scoring: RICE for Solutions

Apply RICE to evaluate candidate Solutions:

• Reach: How many users will this solution affect?

• Impact: How much will it move the needle? (1 = minimal, 3 = massive)

• Confidence: How sure are we this will work? (percentage)

• Effort: Person-months required

Compute (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort as a single priority score.

Solution scoring: Value × Effort matrix

The simplest and most common Solution scoring setup:

• Value: Expected impact of the solution (combine sub-scores for customer value, revenue impact, strategic alignment, etc.)

• Effort: Implementation complexity (combine sub-scores for dev effort, design effort, dependencies, risk, etc.)

Plot on the Solution matrix:

• Top-left (high value, low effort): Quick wins — do these first

• Top-right (high value, high effort): Strategic bets — plan and invest

• Bottom-left (low value, low effort): Fill-ins — do if capacity allows

• Bottom-right (low value, high effort): Deprioritize — avoid these

Solution scoring: WSJF

Set up Weighted Shortest Job First for flow-based delivery teams:

Input scores:

• User/Business Value (1–10)

• Time Criticality (1–10)

• Risk Reduction / Opportunity Enablement (1–10)

• Job Size (1–10)

Computed scores:

• Cost of Delay = User Value + Time Criticality + Risk Reduction

• WSJF = Cost of Delay / Job Size

Solutions with the highest WSJF score should be delivered first.

Solution scoring: DFV (Desirability, Feasibility, Viability)

Use IDEO's innovation filter for early-stage Solution evaluation:

• Desirability (1–10): Do customers want this?

• Feasibility (1–10): Can we build this?

• Viability (1–10): Does the business model work?

All three must score adequately — a solution that's desirable but not feasible, or feasible but not viable, shouldn't proceed. Plot on the matrix or compute a combined score.

Using the matrix for Opportunities and Solutions

The matrix view is available for both Opportunities and Solutions, letting you visualize prioritization as a 2D plot.

For Opportunities, the matrix typically shows:

• X-axis: Effort or Feasibility

• Y-axis: Value (customer value, business value, or a composite)

This helps identify which problems are both important and addressable.

For Solutions, the matrix typically shows:

• X-axis: Effort or Cost

• Y-axis: Expected Impact or ROI

This helps identify which solutions deliver the most value for the least investment.

Pro tip: Use the Opportunity matrix to decide where to focus, then use the Solution matrix to decide how to act. This two-step process prevents the common trap of jumping to solutions before properly evaluating the problem space.