One of the simplest things you can do for any team is define a prioritization framework. Six rows and three columns, written once and reused daily.
Doing so has three benefits:
1/ The work is highly observable. At the team level, anyone can quickly understand “is team X working on important things” and the supporting rationale.
2/ No work is precious. At the individual level, managers and individual contributors can quickly determine trade-offs when new needs arise or priorities shift.
3/ The priority is the alignment. Publicly defining your framework and a project’s associated priority accelerates disagreement between stakeholders and discussion of missing context or changing facts.
My format is:
| Priority level | Intent | Guidelines (the important part, examples below) |
|---|---|---|
| P0 | Must do, urgently | Unblocks corporate strategy, critical issue impacting most customers |
| P1 | Must do | Tied to a corporate objective, feature outage |
| P2 | Should do | Improvement to existing service or product |
| P3 | Nice to have | Quality of life fixes |
| Not applicable | Not within scope | Misalignment with team priorities, skillset, or capacity |
All six rows are necessary:
- Header - Schema
- P0 - Overrides everything
- P1 - The default to negotiate from and review weekly
- P2 - Discuss when, not if, and review monthly
- P3 - Discuss if and review quarterly
- Not applicable - Stakeholders need to know when you’re saying no
The hard work goes into column three: the custom guidelines for your team or company. This is how your team(s) will evaluate their work.
A good framework creates decision-making consistency. A prioritization framework has lasting effects across all stages of a project, from scoping to building to shipping.