Escape the Prioritization Trap

“Team, we’ve prioritized the work. Here are the 10 items for the next release.”

Sounds good, right? But maybe not good enough.

When there’s a bucket of work items that are (presumably) equally important, teams spread thin. You see this in parallel efforts, high WIP, little collaboration, ever-tenser status meetings, escalations, and sometimes death marches.

Alternatively, if a team has a ranked (numbered) list, they’ll work on the first item or maybe two, then on the next item or two, and so on. That results in more collaboration, better risk management, less context switching, easier adaptability, and greater well-being.

What I’ve described are two basic principles for prioritization:

Bucketing. For example, high/medium/low; now/next/later; must have/nice to have; sprints/releases
Ranking. What is the first thing to do, second, third, etc.

However, you don’t need to choose one or the other. The sweet spot is a combination: rank the near-term items and keep the later ones in a few buckets. Then rank the buckets relative to each other: this is the next batch of work, then that batch, and so on.

In my experience, most companies have become trapped: they only use bucketing, not ranking.

Sometimes, even that doesn’t happen, or the buckets are too big to be useful. There are systemic and political reasons for that, but also a very human one: both bucketing and ranking are scary, though in different ways.

With bucketing, calling something “medium” or “low” feels like dooming it to never get done. That’s how everything becomes high priority (or super-high, or some other made-up term).

With ranking, it’s uncomfortable to declare that X should precede Y, especially if you might be wrong, or the choice has consequences.

How do you make ranking easier and less scary, and therefore more likely to be used? Try these techniques:

Prompt the decision-makers with “If you could have only one item from the list, what would it be?” After they choose one, repeat this with the remaining items. (I remember resisting this technique at first, but I’ve seen it work well every time.)
Use bubble-sort. If it’s hard to pick the top one, compare items in pairs: “Is X more important/urgent than Y?”
Split large items by value or risk, then apply the previous two techniques.

Ranking isn’t perfect, but it’s better than letting everything compete for attention.