So many times, we find ourselves in conversations about priorities at work. On an individual level, a team level, and even across an entire organization.
What initiative should I focus on? Do we invest in event marketing or AEO first? Should we build a new product feature or clear some of our tech debt?
Then there are the company-wide prioritization meetings where every leader is pushing for what they believe makes the most sense.
Product wants to launch a new feature based on customer feedback, but Engineering wants to address mounting tech debt. Sales wants Product to build a different feature that could potentially unblock an enterprise deal. Marketing wants to launch a campaign to drive more leads, but Sales would rather have Marketing support the deals already in the pipeline. Customer Success wants to solve a recurring customer problem, but Engineering doesn’t have the bandwidth to build the tool they need.
The crazy thing is that each request is valid. Nobody is necessarily wrong. But everyone is evaluating the work according to a different desired outcome. Product may be optimizing for adoption. Engineering for stability. Sales for immediate revenue. Marketing for pipeline. Customer Success for retention.
The conversation sounds like it’s about which project should come first. But if you look a little closer and dig a little deeper, you’ll see that everyone is prioritizing for something different.
When teams struggle to agree on priorities, leaders often assume they need a better scoring system or prioritization framework. So they reach for something tangible like RICE, ICE, MoSCoW, or a simple value vs effort matrix.
These frameworks can be useful. They give teams a consistent way to compare possible initiatives and may ask them to assess things like impact, importance, potential, effort, or confidence.
But what does “impact” mean if nobody has agreed on the outcome they’re trying to impact? Impact on what? Revenue? Adoption? Operational efficiency? Customer satisfaction?
And what makes something “important”? Important to whom? Important right now or over the next three years? What counts as “valuable” and how will we know whether that value was actually created?
Sure, a framework can organize the answers but it can’t provide them for you.
There was a time when I was leading a global marketing team and realized that, despite the experience and talent across the team, we were prioritizing initiatives without a clear enough connection to our business objectives.
We didn’t have shared criteria guiding those decisions. We also weren’t consistently accounting for what prioritizing one initiative would mean for the work the team had to decline, delay, or stop. Some of the ideas seemed great on the surface and even produced measurable results.
But the ultimate reason why they were doing them and how those results contributed to what the company needed wasn’t necessarily clear. I wanted my team to maintain autonomy in their decisions but I knew that I first needed to empower them with more structure around their thinking.
So I pulled everyone together, and we took the time to articulate the company’s goals, identify the business objectives supporting them, define Marketing’s contribution, and establish the KPIs that would tell us whether we were making progress.
Now we had a clearer picture of where we were going, why we were going there, and how we would know whether we were getting there.
Only then did we build our own scoring model to help the team evaluate and prioritize initiatives independently. (I’ll share more on that model in another post soon.)
But even with a shared outcome and a scoring model, we had to acknowledge something else - that whenever we prioritize something, we are delaying, deprioritizing, or completely stopping something else.
There are always trade-offs.
We needed to understand what pursuing a priority would require. How much budget, time, attention, and cross-functional support would it need? What would we have to stop doing to make room for it? What risks would that introduce? Who owned the result, and who had the authority to make the final decision?
All important things to consider, and all of that stemmed from first articulating the desired outcome.
So once you and your team are clear on the desired outcome, you can structure your thinking by asking:
How will we know whether we’re making progress? What are the relevant KPIs?
How does each proposed initiative contribute to the outcome?
What would pursuing it require in people, time, money, attention, and dependencies?
What would we have to delay, deprioritize, or stop, and what risks would that create?
Who owns the result, and who makes the final decision?
The next time a prioritization conversation starts going in circles, pause before everyone begins defending their project.
Write one question where everyone can see it -
“What is the desired outcome we are prioritizing for?”
Then ask each person to answer it. If the answers are different, then you’re not ready to start ranking the work. The disagreement is probably the most useful information in the room. It tells you that the team has alignment work to do before it has a prioritization decision to make.
Because until you agree on the outcome, you’re not actually debating which work matters most.
You’re arguing for different futures without realizing it.