All high functioning teams must prioritize. Not once a month, not once a week, but rigorously, and ruthlessly.
Prioritization means doing the things that are most important first. If you build products, it means doing the things that create the most customer value first.
In my experience, the craft of making prioritization decisions is one of the most difficult skills to impart on teams because of how complex those decisions can become, and while it’s usually a core responsibility of product managers, I’ve found that the best teams are the ones where everyone is maniacally prioritizing towards the same goal, and doing so in a way that’s consistent with each other.
When prioritizing between projects, you have to make one big decision: what will my team invest in next? The right way to approach this turns out to be like completing a puzzle. Apply a rigorous process to find all the pieces, and the answer is in how they all fit together.
When prioritizing work within a project, you have to make the same decision hundreds of times: is this absolutely necessary to do? The right way to approach this is by accepting the chaotic nature of building products, and then develop a ruthless mindset to make quick decisions about what’s absolutely necessary.
Prioritization is a craftYour team’s time is the most precious resource a company has at its disposal, and if part of your job is to direct that time, you need to become great at it. It’s a craft, and one that you can deliberately get better at with practice.
I’d like to leave you with one last truth about prioritization: there is always a way to accomplish your goal faster than you currently plan to.
Always. You just have to find it. You just have to ask, “How can we do this in half the time?” at the end of that planning meeting, and miraculously — the team will find a way.
This is an extract from the article titled,
“Ruthless Prioritization”, by Brandon Chu, product director at Shopify, appearing here on
medium.com
