PIE Prioritization Framework

Prioritize your test ideas with the PIE Framework

The PIE prioritization framework was originally designed by Conversion President, Chris Goward, to prioritize A/B test target areas. In other words, it was meant to answer the question: “Where should I test first?”.

What is the PIE Prioritization Framework?

Today, companies like HubSpot use PIE to prioritize other opportunities, such as, “Which idea should I test first?” and “Which personalized experience should I test first?”, each of which may have different sub-factors.

These are important questions: You can’t test everywhere or everything at once. With limited time and resources and, most importantly, limited traffic to allocate to each test, prioritization is a key part of your conversion optimization plan.

What is the PIE Prioritization Framework?

Prioritizing where you invest energy will give you better returns by emphasizing pages that are more important to your business. At Conversion, we have consistently found that teams who have used tools like the PIE workbook as training materials on how to properly prioritize web optimization, are more effective in determining how to design the strongest experimentation roadmap for their company.

The 3 criteria to prioritize pages

Potential

How much improvement can be made on this page(s)? You should prioritize your worst performers. This should take into account your web analytics data, customer data, and expert heuristic analysis of user scenarios.

Importance

How valuable is the traffic to this page(s)? Your most important pages are those with the highest volume and the costliest traffic. You may have identified pages that perform terribly, but if they don’t have significant volume of costly traffic, they aren’t testing priorities.

Ease

How difficult will it be to implement a test on this page or template? The final consideration is the degree of difficulty of actually running a test on this page, which includes technical implementation, and organizational or political barriers.
The less time and resources you need to invest for the same return, the better. This includes both technical and “political” ease. A page that would be technically easy to test on may have many stakeholders or vested interests that can cause barriers (like your homepage, for example).

Sample PIE prioritization analysis

You can quantify each of your potential opportunities based on these criteria to create your test priority list. We use the PIE Framework in a table to turn all of these data inputs into an objective number ranking.

“Figuring out the “What?”

The EASIER Method

Once high value areas of customer facing properties have been determined, the next step is to determine what to test. Clients often have a lot of ideas, but not all of them are feasible or meaningful right now. The EASIER Framework allows us to remove all biases from the decision making process.

EASIER Framework:

Evidence – Quality and quantity of evidence collected
Alignment – How well the idea aligns with business objectives
Speed – How many days will the test need to run
Impact – Estimated financial Impact
Effort – Time & resources
Reality – Likelihood of being productionalized

The EASIER scoring system not only helps determine the best hypotheses to prioritize, it also helps to reduce fallout around idea ownership. Having an agreed upon system to handle tests objectively takes politics out of the equation, and allows you to be smarter with your testing.

Featured workbook

Start prioritizing where and what to test first with the PIE workbook

Use this workbook to identify and categorize the Potential, Importance, and Ease of your webpages and hypotheses.

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