“This is our top priority now. Everything else falls by the wayside.”
A leader at one of our clients said this recently to a product owner about an urgent batch of customer feedback that needed analysis. The PO cleared their plate and dug in.
A few days later, the same leader wanted to know why a different feature wasn’t done yet.
This is a particularly vivid example of a common problem: Everything’s priority #1. Items might get ranked, but really, it all has to get done (whether that’s actually possible or not).
It’s reasonable to want clear priorities. But because prioritization involves:
- making decisions about an uncertain future
- that involve giving things up
- in a social context where the decisions make some people unhappy,
there are real psychological and social barriers to prioritizing work.
Some POs try to address this by treating prioritization as a spreadsheet problem. “If we just make it quantitative and objective, everyone will understand and be satisfied with the results.” I’ve written before about why that doesn’t work.
Instead of forcing prioritization, sometimes it’s better to just work around the psychological and social barriers to get an answer about what’s next without having to overcome the resistance directly.
Here are our two favorite ways to sidestep the psychological and social challenges so you can get a clear #1.
Sidestep loss aversion with the guarantee question
When we’re looking at a list of work that might happen, it somehow feels like all of it is possible. To decide what’s most important is also, implicitly, to decide what’s not. And the work that’s less important might not get done. Of course, prioritizing the work didn’t make it any bigger. Something wasn’t going to fit either way. Once we name that something, though, it feels more real. And our brains don’t like giving things up.
The guarantee question takes that loss off the table: “If you had a magic wand that would guarantee one of these gets done (and the others still might), how would you use your magic wand?”
The stakeholder who was frozen with indecision when asked to rank their five requests (“they’re all top priority!”) can answer this question in a flash and can even explain why that one is actually top priority. Repeat the question for what’s left, and it still works. You can usually get the top 3-5 items before it becomes silly.
Now, this may feel like a trick. It may be. But it’s a trick in service of the stakeholder who’s stuck, whose brain is getting in their own way.
Focus on slicing and sequence instead of importance
Sometimes, the leader asking for things is carrying their stakeholders’ priorities, and there’s no higher-level strategy to decide between them. They may not have the domain expertise to make that call, even if they have the authority to do it.
Other times, “this is essential” really means “don’t lose it,” but there’s not actually any urgency to get it done. It just needs to be captured somewhere.
In both those cases, it’s possible to avoid the importance or value question altogether by focusing on slicing and sequence.
First, slice items into Minimum Marketable Features or MMFs, the smallest chunks that would have a meaningful impact. This ensures there’s no low-value content in one item unnecessarily delaying another.
Then, out of all the top MMFs, ask which one can provide benefit soonest and which ones can wait a little bit. Often, a “top priority” item won’t actually provide any benefit until some future date or until some other work is done. There’s no harm in delaying that one.
By narrowing work to MMFs, you can craft a sequence in which every stakeholder gets value soon without imposing lots of context switching on the team. One MMF at a time, interleaved to maximize the flow of value.
We help our clients ensure they’re working on the right things in the right sequence, from strategy workshops with senior leadership teams to skill development for product owners to facilitating the early phases of high-stakes initiatives. Here’s how one client recently described the value of what we did with them:
Understanding how to walk stakeholders through the why, the what, the when, and the how is so worth the investment in and of itself. It makes you a much more effective leader as a Product Owner. I would do it any day of the week at any organization again.
Schedule a free consulting call with us to discover how Humanizing Work can help you solve your most important prioritization challenges.
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