You have 14 intents in draft. Your team can ship two this sprint. Which ones?
If your answer involves a spreadsheet, a RICE score, or a "gut feel" conversation in your next planning meeting — you're guessing. And guessing is how teams ship features that nobody uses.
Intents carry their own evidence. The evidence tells you what matters. Stop scoring and start reading.
Why Traditional Prioritization Breaks Down
RICE, MoSCoW, Value vs. Effort — these frameworks all share the same flaw: they ask you to estimate impact before you've built anything. The scores feel precise but they're invented.
Intents are different. Each one is linked to the evidence that created it. That lineage is your prioritization signal.
The Method
Step 1: Count the Evidence
The simplest signal: how many evidence items point at this intent?
An intent synthesized from a cluster of 9 friction reports, 3 user quotes, and a metric showing 40% drop-off is not the same as an intent based on one feature request from your CEO.
| Intent | Evidence count | Source diversity |
|---|---|---|
| Fix export flow | 9 friction, 3 quotes, 1 metric | Support, interviews, analytics |
| Add dark mode | 2 requests | Slack, 1 interview |
| Team permissions | 5 friction, 4 quotes | Interviews, sales calls |
Evidence count is not a score. It's a signal of how real the problem is.
Step 2: Check Source Diversity
Twelve evidence items from the same angry customer is not the same as twelve items from twelve different users across three channels.
Strong signal: friction appearing independently in support tickets, user interviews, AND analytics. Three unrelated sources converging on the same problem means the problem is structural, not situational.
Weak signal: multiple items from one source. Could be a power user with niche needs, a vocal minority, or a one-off incident.
Step 3: Read the Severity
Not all friction is equal. Evidence items carry emotional and operational weight:
- Blocking friction: User literally cannot complete their task. ("The export button does nothing.")
- Degrading friction: User completes the task but it's painful. ("It takes me 20 minutes to set up a report.")
- Cosmetic friction: Annoying but not harmful. ("The icon looks weird on mobile.")
A cluster of 3 blocking friction items outranks a cluster of 10 cosmetic ones. Always.
Step 4: Find the Dependencies
Some intents unlock others. Before you prioritize in isolation, ask:
- Does this intent unblock anything else? If fixing authentication enables team features, collaboration features, and shared dashboards — it's a multiplier.
- Does this intent depend on something unbuilt? If your "real-time notifications" intent requires a WebSocket infrastructure you don't have, the infrastructure intent comes first regardless of evidence weight.
The highest-evidence intent is not always the right one to build next. The one that unblocks the most downstream intents often is.
Step 5: Kill the Stragglers
This is the step most PMs skip. Look at the intents with:
- 1–2 evidence items
- Single source
- No new evidence in 30+ days
These are ideas, not problems. Archive them. They're cluttering your backlog and creating the illusion of choice.
If the problem is real, new evidence will surface and you'll recreate the intent with actual backing. If it doesn't resurface — you just saved your team from building something nobody needs.
The Decision Framework
When two intents compete for the same sprint, run through this sequence:
- Evidence count and diversity — Which one has more signal from more sources?
- Severity — Which one involves blocking friction?
- Dependencies — Which one unblocks more downstream work?
- Freshness — Is evidence still arriving, or did it peak three months ago?
You don't need a formula. You need to read the evidence and make the call. The evidence is there to make the call defensible, not to make it automatic.
💡 Tip: If you can't decide between two intents after reading their evidence, they might be the same problem expressed differently. Check if the evidence overlaps. If it does, merge them.
Anti-Patterns
❌ The Roadmap Spec: Cramming a quarter of work into a single intent so it "scores higher." An intent is one problem with one set of outcomes. If it takes more than 2 weeks to build, break it apart.
❌ Priority by Loudness: The stakeholder who emails most gets their intent prioritized. Evidence weight doesn't care about org charts.
❌ The Score Sheet: Assigning numerical scores to evidence dimensions and summing them into a priority number. You're laundering guesswork through arithmetic. Read the evidence instead.
❌ The Frozen Backlog: Prioritizing once per quarter and never revisiting. Evidence is live. New friction arrives daily. Re-read your backlog every sprint.
Next Steps
- Audit your backlog: Open your intent list and sort by evidence count. Are you working on the right things?
- Archive the ghosts: Find intents with thin evidence and no recent activity. Archive them now.
- Check dependencies: Map which intents block others. See if your current sprint order makes sense.