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Summary
This is part 1 of a 3-part series on prioritization, led by Harry Max, author of Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions. Part 2 | Part 3 Prioritization is a deceptively tricky topic that lurks behind the scenes but informs everything. It’s a fundamental skill for organizations, teams, and ICs, and most people accept that it’s essential, but we are not taught how to do it. You can prioritize almost anything, not just goals, projects, and tasks; values, for example. Our main challenge is finding new methods to reach goals amongst multiple teams with conflicting priorities. There is some good news: there is a repeatable process model. And some approaches are better than others, especially for organizations and teams. This conversation will take the topic to a new level. It will also help you gain a profound new level of clarity about creating better plans and making smarter decisions.
Key Insights
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Prioritization is often confused with personal productivity or time management, but it applies broadly to resource allocation within teams and organizations.
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Top organizations manage prioritization intuitively even without explicit frameworks, by knowing what matters most and making tough trade-offs.
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Priorities are not legitimate until they are properly prioritized by assigning measurable attributes and values to items for comparison.
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Different levels of abstraction in prioritization require framing, such as comparing streams of small tweaks as a whole against large complex projects.
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Having multiple simultaneous priorities is possible; urgency and value profiles differ, so forced ranking is often impractical.
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Prioritization is as much a continuous process involving revisiting assumptions and adapting to new information as it is a one-time decision.
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Clear ownership of prioritization responsibilities is essential to avoid confusion and ensure accountability in decision-making.
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Confusing prioritizing work items with prioritizing customer segments or goals leads to misalignment among product and design teams.
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Overprioritization without clarity leads to 'lack of a priority' problems, causing teams to spread resources thinly and reduce effectiveness.
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Effective prioritization balances setting strategic direction with practical resource capacity allocation and must handle trade-offs gracefully.
Notable Quotes
"There’s a huge gap between theory and practice when it comes to prioritization in complex dynamic environments."
"Priorities aren’t priorities until they’ve been prioritized with attributes and values; otherwise they’re just items."
"It’s actually very hard to prioritize things that are apples versus oranges without framing them similarly first."
"People often confuse prioritization with sequencing – understanding relative importance is one thing, but when and how you do things matters too."
"If all 50 items are said to be important, you can’t do them all at once; starting randomly is better than stalling."
"Most teams have way too many false priority ones – their number one priority is the lack of a priority."
"Ownership means anticipating, observing, orienting, deciding, acting, and monitoring – there has to be a clear owner for these phases."
"Prioritization is as much about saying no gracefully as it is about saying yes to the right things."
"If you spend 15 out of 62 business days prioritizing and still don’t have a clear list, you’re probably prioritizing at the wrong level."
"What am I avoiding? Asking that every day turns out to be a surprisingly powerful prioritization tool."
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