7 ms·

A Magic Prioritization Trick

87 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

nattaylor 3y ago
Whoever came up with the 1-3 month game changer oughta get a promotion
- saulpw 3y ago
  I come up with these all day long. They come along with a bunch of whenever tweaks. The trick is identifying which is which and making a strong case so that other people buy into the same prioritization. And then being right...
imbusy111 3y ago
Sounds like a variation of the typical urgent vs. important matrix.
- tarboreus 3y ago
  I knew it was going to be that when I saw the headline.
- jholman 3y ago
  Of course it's a variation on that. Quite explicitly. The interesting part is that it's allegedly a trick to get people to stop conflating the two, or cheating.
schneems 3y ago
I did something like this at my last offsite. I also split the task into two sections, i think we traditionally use impact and cost/difficulty. Then we stack ranked ideas using a horizontal wall. Once for impact. Once for difficulty. Then after the fact I correlated the outcome into a matrix. It’s like the difference between having humans estimate volume (hard and error prone) versus estimating length (much more likely to be accurate). The exercise was less painful to implement and the results seemed more accurate.
felixyz 3y ago
This is good, but unless you're a minimal team of one or two (or even if you are), sometimes the best thing is to get a bunch of tweaks (say 5-10) done in a week or two, because it makes users feel like you care, and they might add up to a considerable improvement in satisfaction/delight although individually each is insignificant. In other words: polish can't wait forever.
- alexpotato 3y ago
  100% agree. Another way to look at it: if you deliver a couple of quick tweaks that the users want in the next week, that can buy you some time to do more behind the scenes refactoring/tech debt cleanup.
- BerislavLopac 3y ago
  I think that the boxes on the "importance" scale are not very well named. I would personally use something like Critical, Important and Nice-to-have; or maybe a variation of the good old MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could; the "Won'ts" can be omitted for obvious reasons. That being said, I can imagine each team having their own definition and levels of importance, with the names that are meaningful within their particular context.
- closed 3y ago
  It seems like this is a lot of the strategy behind pitching things as epics. If tweaks interact to produce considerable satisfaction / delight, then bundling them together keeps focus on what big thing happens when they're all completed..!
alexpotato 3y ago
As someone pointed out, this is a variation of the Urgent/Important matrix. I've found that there is a next step / additional dimension that can be very useful as well: Once you have what's in the important row, ask people what they would want to work on. Assuming everyone is qualified for the tasks, I've found that giving something urgent/important to someone who wants to work on it vs someone who doesn't DRAMATICALLY improves the odds of it getting done quickly. This being HN, someone will say: "But what about things nobody wants to work on". Great question! The answer is to either: - Have everyone take turns e.g. doing support for the team on a rotation - Make trades vs the future e.g. "I know you don't want to do this now. If you do it though, I guarantee you get first choice on what you want to work on next."
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  I find it difficult to understand the opposition between Urgent and important, I could understand for example an opposition between difficult and beneficial. But urgent and important sound somewhat like synonyms. Something urgent must be the most important.
  - mschnell 3y ago
    I struggled with this for years (decades, actually) and used similar reasoning as the sibling comments. And it doesn’t work. Funnily enough the solution is very simple, but you need to have a list of goals you want to reach. Everything that helps you get closer to fulfilling your goals is important, everything else is unimportant.
  - harperlee 3y ago
    You are right that urgency is related to value (same as important), but also to time. One way to look at it is that urgent things are those whose value is soon going to be accelerating quite a lot (even infinitely), either up or down. Important things are things whose value is high, irrespective of rate of change. Example: Fix the hole now or the boat sinks: urgent (currently you have a boat that is completely functional: that's going to change). Arrive to the intended port and not a wrong one: important (if you make a mistake, you may need to spend several days travelling back. Sure, the longer you keep navigating in a wrong direction the more fuel and time you lose, but it is not super-urgent).
postexitus 3y ago
There should be a special place in hell for people who come up with 2-axis, 4 quadrant categorization of things and a VIP entrance for those making trivial modifications on them and branding it the Magic Way (TM).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- simplify 3y ago
  Not sure what you're saying here, can you explain the negative effects you're implicitly suggesting exist?
skapadia 3y ago
Way too complex. Just have ChatGPT figure this out for you, given a nicely engineered prompt :)
lazyant 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...
jroseattle 3y ago
Most of these processes are garbage-in-garbage out. Since these are designed to help a team deliver the best bang-for-the-buck at a given point in time, I've found proper assessment of actual urgency and importance are the biggest success factors. Can't express the number of times that an urgent or important need that was identified was addressed by my team, with nary any impact.
CaffeinatedDev 3y ago
This system makes sense on a fundamentals level, but something to also consider is the synergy principle (1+1=3) where some tasks, when coupled together, could potentially be bumped from optimizer to game changer (or bumped from tweak). Great visuals though, made the system super easy to comprehend.
mjfisher 3y ago
I think some of the comments that are writing this off as not very useful are missing a point. Almost all businesses prioritising finite resource should be using some form of CD3/WSJF; but it's very hard to communicate why to stakeholders without diving into some math and graphs that some people have a hard time understanding. This looks like a really good way of getting people to practice cost-of-delay based prioritisation in a structured, reproducible way that doesn't involve formulas or maths.
steveBK123 3y ago
The magic trick is to have a singular queue, and/or a singular stakeholder representative. When you have disparate independent stakeholders who each have their own value/urgency models, these things start to fall apart. I've frequently worked in large orgs with far more internal stakeholders than devs, which meant that at any given time, only 50% of stakeholders were having any of their tasks actively worked on. You can play games to try and mask that, but end of the day it is reality. So then the game they all play is making sure they are one of the stakeholders with active tasks at all times. Which then turns into competitive escalatory MAD. Which mostly turns into management by squeakiest wheel, because if you don't take care of badguyX, he is going to tell his bosses boss you are an idiot, so it's easier just to keep the queue of badguyX active then piss them off and then still have to do their work after all the fight. No manager wants to admit falling into this game, but they very very often do. I'd also point out in these situations, the tie breaker / decision maker is far more senior of a person than someone who is going to go through some sort of quantitative process vs "using their judgement" (aka gut). Not saying I have an answer, but am saying the post is solving a simpler version of the actual problem.
- warner25 3y ago
  I'm so glad that I just stumbled across this comment. I'm a career military officer who has served on big, upper-echelon staffs that were stunningly disorganized and dysfunctional. You nailed it with this description of how things really work. I always said that people were busy - there was a frenzy activity - but nothing ever got done until someone very senior (i.e the commanding general or one of his deputy commanders) stepped in, like you said, and made a decision from his gut that a particular thing needed to get done, and then everybody would actively work on that one thing and nobody's work would be blocked. Eventually I realized that the game for stakeholders was all about getting their things into a decision briefing for the commander to make that happen.
- em-bee 3y ago
  the solution is obviously to always work on multiple tasks simultaneously. how often you need to switch depends on the granularity of the report. if your report is daily you touch each task once a day. if it is hourly, you switch through all tasks every hour. the pomodoro method has you taking a break every 30 minutes, so two tasks each hour are possible without cutting time on each task to short. i am not entirely serious. but as an independent contractor with multiple customers, working on tasks for different clients every day or every week is not unrealistic.

87 points by BerislavLopac 3y ago

nattaylor 3y ago

Whoever came up with the 1-3 month game changer oughta get a promotion

saulpw 3y ago
I come up with these all day long. They come along with a bunch of whenever tweaks. The trick is identifying which is which and making a strong case so that other people buy into the same prioritization. And then being right...

imbusy111 3y ago

Sounds like a variation of the typical urgent vs. important matrix.

tarboreus 3y ago
I knew it was going to be that when I saw the headline.
jholman 3y ago
Of course it's a variation on that. Quite explicitly. The interesting part is that it's allegedly a trick to get people to stop conflating the two, or cheating.

schneems 3y ago

I did something like this at my last offsite. I also split the task into two sections, i think we traditionally use impact and cost/difficulty. Then we stack ranked ideas using a horizontal wall. Once for impact. Once for difficulty. Then after the fact I correlated the outcome into a matrix. It’s like the difference between having humans estimate volume (hard and error prone) versus estimating length (much more likely to be accurate). The exercise was less painful to implement and the results seemed more accurate.

felixyz 3y ago

This is good, but unless you're a minimal team of one or two (or even if you are), sometimes the best thing is to get a bunch of tweaks (say 5-10) done in a week or two, because it makes users feel like you care, and they might add up to a considerable improvement in satisfaction/delight although individually each is insignificant. In other words: polish can't wait forever.

alexpotato 3y ago
100% agree. Another way to look at it: if you deliver a couple of quick tweaks that the users want in the next week, that can buy you some time to do more behind the scenes refactoring/tech debt cleanup.
BerislavLopac 3y ago
I think that the boxes on the "importance" scale are not very well named. I would personally use something like Critical, Important and Nice-to-have; or maybe a variation of the good old MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could; the "Won'ts" can be omitted for obvious reasons. That being said, I can imagine each team having their own definition and levels of importance, with the names that are meaningful within their particular context.
closed 3y ago
It seems like this is a lot of the strategy behind pitching things as epics. If tweaks interact to produce considerable satisfaction / delight, then bundling them together keeps focus on what big thing happens when they're all completed..!

alexpotato 3y ago

As someone pointed out, this is a variation of the Urgent/Important matrix. I've found that there is a next step / additional dimension that can be very useful as well: Once you have what's in the important row, ask people what they would want to work on. Assuming everyone is qualified for the tasks, I've found that giving something urgent/important to someone who wants to work on it vs someone who doesn't DRAMATICALLY improves the odds of it getting done quickly. This being HN, someone will say: "But what about things nobody wants to work on". Great question! The answer is to either: - Have everyone take turns e.g. doing support for the team on a rotation - Make trades vs the future e.g. "I know you don't want to do this now. If you do it though, I guarantee you get first choice on what you want to work on next."

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
I find it difficult to understand the opposition between Urgent and important, I could understand for example an opposition between difficult and beneficial. But urgent and important sound somewhat like synonyms. Something urgent must be the most important.
- mschnell 3y ago
  I struggled with this for years (decades, actually) and used similar reasoning as the sibling comments. And it doesn’t work. Funnily enough the solution is very simple, but you need to have a list of goals you want to reach. Everything that helps you get closer to fulfilling your goals is important, everything else is unimportant.
- harperlee 3y ago
  You are right that urgency is related to value (same as important), but also to time. One way to look at it is that urgent things are those whose value is soon going to be accelerating quite a lot (even infinitely), either up or down. Important things are things whose value is high, irrespective of rate of change. Example: Fix the hole now or the boat sinks: urgent (currently you have a boat that is completely functional: that's going to change). Arrive to the intended port and not a wrong one: important (if you make a mistake, you may need to spend several days travelling back. Sure, the longer you keep navigating in a wrong direction the more fuel and time you lose, but it is not super-urgent).

postexitus 3y ago

There should be a special place in hell for people who come up with 2-axis, 4 quadrant categorization of things and a VIP entrance for those making trivial modifications on them and branding it the Magic Way (TM).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
simplify 3y ago
Not sure what you're saying here, can you explain the negative effects you're implicitly suggesting exist?

skapadia 3y ago

Way too complex. Just have ChatGPT figure this out for you, given a nicely engineered prompt :)

lazyant 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...

jroseattle 3y ago

Most of these processes are garbage-in-garbage out. Since these are designed to help a team deliver the best bang-for-the-buck at a given point in time, I've found proper assessment of actual urgency and importance are the biggest success factors. Can't express the number of times that an urgent or important need that was identified was addressed by my team, with nary any impact.

CaffeinatedDev 3y ago

This system makes sense on a fundamentals level, but something to also consider is the synergy principle (1+1=3) where some tasks, when coupled together, could potentially be bumped from optimizer to game changer (or bumped from tweak). Great visuals though, made the system super easy to comprehend.

mjfisher 3y ago

I think some of the comments that are writing this off as not very useful are missing a point. Almost all businesses prioritising finite resource should be using some form of CD3/WSJF; but it's very hard to communicate why to stakeholders without diving into some math and graphs that some people have a hard time understanding. This looks like a really good way of getting people to practice cost-of-delay based prioritisation in a structured, reproducible way that doesn't involve formulas or maths.

steveBK123 3y ago

The magic trick is to have a singular queue, and/or a singular stakeholder representative. When you have disparate independent stakeholders who each have their own value/urgency models, these things start to fall apart. I've frequently worked in large orgs with far more internal stakeholders than devs, which meant that at any given time, only 50% of stakeholders were having any of their tasks actively worked on. You can play games to try and mask that, but end of the day it is reality. So then the game they all play is making sure they are one of the stakeholders with active tasks at all times. Which then turns into competitive escalatory MAD. Which mostly turns into management by squeakiest wheel, because if you don't take care of badguyX, he is going to tell his bosses boss you are an idiot, so it's easier just to keep the queue of badguyX active then piss them off and then still have to do their work after all the fight. No manager wants to admit falling into this game, but they very very often do. I'd also point out in these situations, the tie breaker / decision maker is far more senior of a person than someone who is going to go through some sort of quantitative process vs "using their judgement" (aka gut). Not saying I have an answer, but am saying the post is solving a simpler version of the actual problem.

warner25 3y ago
I'm so glad that I just stumbled across this comment. I'm a career military officer who has served on big, upper-echelon staffs that were stunningly disorganized and dysfunctional. You nailed it with this description of how things really work. I always said that people were busy - there was a frenzy activity - but nothing ever got done until someone very senior (i.e the commanding general or one of his deputy commanders) stepped in, like you said, and made a decision from his gut that a particular thing needed to get done, and then everybody would actively work on that one thing and nobody's work would be blocked. Eventually I realized that the game for stakeholders was all about getting their things into a decision briefing for the commander to make that happen.
em-bee 3y ago
the solution is obviously to always work on multiple tasks simultaneously. how often you need to switch depends on the granularity of the report. if your report is daily you touch each task once a day. if it is hourly, you switch through all tasks every hour. the pomodoro method has you taking a break every 30 minutes, so two tasks each hour are possible without cutting time on each task to short. i am not entirely serious. but as an independent contractor with multiple customers, working on tasks for different clients every day or every week is not unrealistic.