VECTR: A Lightweight Requirements Prioritization Method for Software Startups Grounded in ROI, Time-to-Value, and Confidence

Startups face critical challenges in prioritizing requirements under severe resource constraints. Although methods such as RICE and ICE are known, prior studies show that decisions often default to ad hoc judgments and stakeholder opinions. This paper introduces and validates VECTR, a lightweight prioritization framework that integrates three criteria highly relevant to startups: return on investment (ROI), Time-to-Value (TtV), and confidence. Rather than presenting these criteria as conceptually new, VECTR’s contribution lies in their explicit operationalization for startup contexts and their integration into a single lightweight visualization. Seventeen practitioners—including founders, product managers, and technical leads—participated in semi-structured interviews. They first described their current prioritization practices and then evaluated VECTR through explanatory material and a proof-of-concept visualization. Results show that ROI, TtV, and confidence are already considered in practice, but inconsistently. Practitioners found VECTR intuitive, visually clear, and useful for structuring discussions, while noting limitations related to estimation effort and subjective assumptions. Most reported that it could support better data-driven decisions, though concerns remained around input estimation and assumptions made by biased humans. This study contributes a financially grounded, software-startup-suitable prioritization method and offers practitioners a practical way to allocate scarce resources toward requirements with the greatest impact, while acknowledging that the validation demonstrates perceived usefulness rather than measurable performance gains.