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Prioritizing everything is prioritizing nothing
- geoduck14 5y agoI'm going to avoid dog-piling on Amazon - because I think that is too easy in this day and age. Instead, I'll firmly agree with everything the author said about prioritization. I think he gave great examples and he is right. When you have 16 different "priorities" and "objectives" that are shared by each employee, you actually have zero priorities. I've seen leaders list many objectives, then say "these go to manager 1, these others go to manager 2, etc".
- loopz 5y agoIt's especially funny when projects and tasks have already been allocated, managers find they need something to do. So they make up long lists of "extra special" tasks and further distribute those while people are neck-deep in realizing business objectives. It mostly ends up in papershuffling, but manage to disrupt enough to feel important anyways. Very easy to fall into the trap of "doing more" though.
- sokoloff 5y agoAt one point, we had [lists containing multiple] Guiding Principles, Strategic Initiatives, Integrated Business Planning, and Key Initiatives for Growth (and for all I remember, maybe a few other categories). Each of those was subtly different; all of them were "priorities". The only thing we had that was entirely clear with respect priority was the "prod is down" was P0.
- loopz 5y agoThose are classic! Of course every department and unit within departments, need their own set of such documents, all following their own standards and competing for attention. Prod is down becomes a sanctuary, compared to the politics and stalemates.
- arnvald 5y agoVirtually every product manager or product owner I worked with had this problem. There were multiple goals and all of them were "euqally important". I started to explain that it's about risk management - the things we pick up first have higher chance to be completed on time, so I asked which ones would cause more trouble if they were delayed. Sometimes that helped, sometimes it didn't. So these days what I say when I can't get clear priorities is this: if everything is equally important, then I'll choose what my team works on first, and I'll do it according to my criteria, which is what tasks do we find most interesting. Almost always the response then is "ok, wait, let me think and by tomorrow I'll send you the list ordered by priority".
- Hokusai 5y agoThen they are not doing their job. I have worked with very good product owners and priority is always clear for the team . Also they are able to negotiate time and scope. Sometimes it makes sense to deliver less features to meet deadlines, others it is better to deliver later the full product. Everything is important and for tomorrow just shows that management/product are not doing their job. I have seen that in one owner companies, it maybe the top that does not allow for the company too work properly, it does not needs to be necessarily any product owner fault.
- arnvald 5y ago> it does not needs to be necessarily any product owner fault I totally agree! I think they're often in difficult situation, I've seen product managers with different priorities coming from various stakeholders. It's often a complicated situation.
- dcow 5y agoI’ve seen it too but isn’t that still their job? If they just transcribe an “everything is urgent” message from the top down to the field, why is the company paying them? Can’t the same be done in an email or all hands? Feels like they’re just masking poor leadership team at that point.
- signa11 5y agoor paraphrased in this quote from ‘the incredibles’ movie, “when everyone is a superman, no one is…”
- discodave 5y agoThat's a nice quote!
- lljk_kennedy 5y agoOne thing I remember from my own time in AWS was that there was inherit tension in the LPs. Customer Obsession might have you spending months to find the product / market fit, whereas Bias for Action might dictate you should ship-to-learn. There was no priority in them - they were rubrics to help guide decision making.
- discodave 5y agoBlog author here: Yeah, I understand the tension idea. But even then, say you had 14 LPs each in tension with another LP. That's a 7-dimensional tension equation to figure out. Say you had 6 LPs in 3 pairs in tension with each other, that seems way more manageable.
- sys_64738 5y agoIf it keeps the product manager happy then what the heck. Especially for functionality planned months in advance. You waste time on setting priorities which are always wrong and change so yeah whatever. Meanwhile, keep doing what you're doing to get towards the MVP.
- daxfohl 5y agoI blatantly call out anyone who is doing this, as not doing the most important part of their job.
- GuB-42 5y agoIt sounds like the usual inflation problem, where "ultra high priority" means "will never be done", and "critical emergency" means "please consider it if you have time". You can call it "50 shades of red" too, where it starts with green/yellow/red color coding then everything becomes red and you have to differentiate between reds. So in the end you have to choose between "deep red" and "crimson red of the darkest night". It was a joke in France during the pandemic where the entire map was colored red, with the shade of red indicating the level of restriction.
- redisman 5y agoThat’s great. At my previous job priority “high” was “maybe in a few months if things magically slow down” and medium and below was basically never getting touched.
- discodave 5y agoGreat examples! I want to call that "priority inflation" as it sounds similar to the idea of "title inflation".
- labrador 5y agoPrioritizing nothing is prioritizing everything
- AlexTWithBeard 5y agoThe same question goes to politicians: I appreciate you're for all the good and against all the evil. But if you want to achieve something you'll have to compromise. Where do you see this compromise to happen? Are you willing to give up on "undocumented migrant rights" for your UBI pet project? Will you soften your stance on mandatory school prayers to avoid tax hikes?