Priority: we often focus on the wrong kind

I can almost bet you hear (something like) this a lot: 

If only we could get our priorities straight.

It's not bad expectation, or advice, in and of itself, but I'd ague it paints an idealistic picture. Some would say that whenever you hear "if only…", that's a path out of pragmatism. We live in the real world, and while we may not fully accept it for what it is, we can't run away from the consequences of how it is…

And truth be told, I am yet to see organizations that are so bad in prioritizing things with potential value (notice the nuance here, I'm talking about potential, whether things play out precisely as we thought they would, it's a completely different matter). The opposite is often much more true: they prioritize too many, and don't focus.

The extreme version of it is the so-called "peanut butter strategy", a recipe for failure, mediocre results at best. That's why I have written before that many systems of delivery don't have a priority problem but a clarity one. They don't understand enough they capacity against demand, and they also are not deliberate enough in ensuring that available capacity can maintain a sustainable pace.

To be clear, this all still alludes to a priority problem, but probably not of the kind you'd typically think about it. Yet so much advice on priority out there is precisely of that kind, of figuring out what we should start next and sequence the options we have.

It's not like that doesn't deserve any attention or rigor, it surely does, and to me it boils down to developing a sort of triaging discipline that enables to consider multiple factors so to figure out the risk profiles of the options you have. So that you can invest on many with lower risk (and some potential value) and perhaps a few with higher risk (and potentially disproportionate value), just like you try to do with your own money investment (e.g., using something like the so-called Barbell strategy).

In the end, we will only know for sure when stuff are in the hands of customers, and having that humility is not only healthy, but gives us some insight on what to do to increase our chances to get it right. The reason why obsessing about value is practically obsessing about flow.

That brings about one mode of prioritization which is, at least from a product execution lens, much more important than defining what work to pull next:

Prioritize WIP: what can we do about making sure the current ongoing things we are betting on now will finish up sooner rather than later. The idea of right-sizing being a pragmatic way to go about it.

Again, we often only will know for sure whether there was value or not after delivering and people start using it. That also means that is important to give priority precisely to being able to figure out whether that happens or not, so to validate our assumptions on value (preferably based on behavior rather than what people say). That's about managing risks: 

Everything you have not yet started is at best an 'option' (with a potential of value).

Everything you are already working on is a 'liability' (you are already invested on it, but right now is just generating cost with no ability to generate any possible value).

Everything you already finished is now an 'asset' you need to manage (for as long as its useful / valuable, then keep it; if not, don't be afraid to discard and go back to the drawing board).

By the way, on a personal note, this, fairly short piece which bundles key insights of quite a bit of fundamentals for (product) execution in a software context, is quite likely the summary I'd like to have had when I was younger and more naive. Whenever I tended to put too much emphasis on upfront heavy analysis, or accepted what sounded like good idea and kept adding things up (either before and even after started working on stuff).

If you happen to have found it useful, that's more than enough for me. It's one of the very reasons I keep doing this (besides for my own sake and how much it has helped me to clarify my own thoughts. Thank you for reading. 

By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect, I'm happy to engage and interact. If I can be of further utility to you or your organization in getting better at working with product development, I am available for part-time advisory, consulting or contract-based engagements.