Everything is a fire. Everything is priority number one. And by tomorrow, the number one priority has changed again. If that sounds like your organization, you are not alone!
It is the single most common challenge we hear whether we are working with a client or standing in front of a room full of leaders. There is real debate in how to handle it, and not everyone agrees on every point, which is exactly what makes it worth writing down. Here is the honest version.
The Complaint We Keep Hearing
Ask a room full of leaders what gets in their way, and one answer comes up repeatedly. Lack of prioritization. We hear it at the start of almost every leadership class, and we hear it from clients in the middle of the work. It is the perennial favorite on the challenge list.
This is bigger than choosing what goes into the next sprint. This is the organization-level problem of teams getting handed a brand-new number one priority every single day. The team is told to drop what they are doing, switch over, and then switch back the moment something else flares up. It is not only that everything is a priority. It is that the priorities will not hold still.
When Everything Is Important, Nothing Is
Here is the heart of it, one line worth living by. When everything is important, nothing is important. If every item is priority number one, people will quietly pick the easiest thing, or the thing they are most comfortable doing, instead of the thing the customer truly needs. Nobody knows what to work on, so they work on the wrong thing.
| “When everything is priority number one, you pick the one that is easiest to do, rather than what is most important for the customer.” |
And the team is the one that pays. They burn out from the whiplash, and they lose motivation because they never get to finish anything. We keep moving the goalposts, so the work sits there half done. From a Lean point of view, that is waste in its purest form. We have paid good people to build something, and it cannot ship, because we changed our mind too many times to ever get it ready.
The Context-Switching Tax
There is a number worth sitting with. Gerald (Jerry) Weinberg’s research found that every time you switch context, you can lose between 20 and 40 percent of your productivity. So, if a person is bouncing between three things, they are not gaining ground, 3 projects: 20% on each is 40% lost. The math of multitasking does not add up the way leaders hope it will.
Quality is the part nobody puts on the scoreboard. When a team is multitasking, work does not finish, rework climbs, defects climb, and tech debt grows because we have lost our focus. There is a perfect image for it. It is like trying to change the wheels on the bus while it is moving. Customer satisfaction drops, and innovation dries up, because a team that is heads down and reactive has no room to try anything new.
It Is a Leadership Problem, not a Team Problem
Here is where we want to be clear. This is not something a team can fix on its own. Scrum will not solve the problem for you, but it will make the problem visible. A lack of prioritization is really a signal that your stakeholders are not aligned and do not fully understand what the team is doing.
| “Holding the team responsible for failing to meet constantly shifting priorities is easier than confronting the stakeholders, management, and C-suite who create the churn.” |
The team sits on the receiving end of this, and the team gets blamed for it. The root cause lives higher up. Sometimes it is a Product Owner who cannot say no to a stakeholder. Sometimes it is a lack of strategy at the top, with senior leaders chasing shiny objects and pulling the team in five directions at once. Wherever it starts, you cannot fix it by tuning the team. You must fix it at the source. One metric we love for surfacing it: forget velocity for a moment and track emergent requests. How many came to the team, and how many did the team take on. That number shows exactly how often people are interrupting the work.
Hold the Line
The sprint gives you a place to stand. When a stakeholder comes mid-sprint with a brand-new top priority, you can say, we are a few days from the start of the next sprint, let us finish what we committed to, and then change anything you want. Before the start of every sprint, the team is agnostic about the work. Reprioritize the whole backlog if you need to. Just let the current work reach done first. You want the code done, ready for release, finished, so the team can move cleanly to the next thing.
The Toolkit
Once you have decided to truly prioritize, you have options. Here are the ones we reach for most.
- MoSCoW. Sort the work into Must have, Should have, Could have, and Will not have. The must-haves are the things the product cannot succeed without. If you are building an accounting system, it must add up. If you are building a car, it must have an engine. It is easy to understand, and it forces honesty about what is truly critical.
- The 20/20 approach. Borrowed from Innovation Games, it works like a visit to the eye doctor. Is this feature more important than that one, one or two, two or three. You compare items head-to-head until you land on a single ordered list. It takes more facilitation and needs your stakeholders in the room, but the payoff is a truly linear, ranked backlog.
- Categorize, then rank. If you have 500 items, do not start with 20/20 or you will be there for a month. Use MoSCoW or Eisenhower to categorize first, then rank-order inside each category. You end up with M1, M2, M3, and a clear sense of what to work on next.
- The impact-effort matrix. Plot effort against impact. High impact and low effort get done first. High impact and high effort need real planning. Low impact and low effort are your quick wins. Low impact and high effort, why are we doing it at all. Kill it, avoid it, or postpone it.
- Buy a feature. Give a room of stakeholders a limited pot of monopoly money, attach a price to each feature, and watch what happens. Budgets are not unlimited, so people pool their money, argue for why their feature matters more, and collaborate to fund what they care about. It surfaces the real priorities fast.
Wins on the Board
One school of thought, often passed down by seasoned managers, goes like this. Nobody outside the team really knows what the work takes, so it all looks equal to them. If you have ten things on your plate, one big and nine small, knock out the nine small ones first. Put the wins on the board and buy yourself the time to do the big thing.
There is a strong counterargument, and it holds up. Size alone is not enough to decide. Look at the big thing and ask why it is big. Maybe it is a regulatory or compliance item, and then it does not matter how many people are waiting on the nine. Maybe one customer is willing to pay you ten million dollars for it. Maybe you can break it down and do four small wins and then the big one. Putting wins on the board is a great place to start when nobody has given you direction, but it is never a blanket rule. Dig into the why before you decide.
What to Take Home
If you take five things from this, take these:
- If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. That phrase is a diagnosis, not a slogan.
- The biggest costs are hidden. Burnout, rework, tech debt, lost innovation, and a context-switching tax of 20 to 40 percent every time you switch.
- Fix it at the source. This is a leadership and alignment problem. The team is on the receiving end, not the cause.
- Use the sprint to hold the line. Finish what is committed, then reprioritize the backlog freely at the next sprint boundary.
- Pick a tool and use it. Categorize with MoSCoW or Eisenhower, then rank inside each category with 20/20, and sharpen the calls with impact-effort and buy-a-feature.
One Last Thing
You cannot just blame the organization or the leadership. Someone must step in. If you do not have a product owner, get one. And it comes down to this.
| “Every time someone says yes, it consumes time, money, and attention. Prioritization is the discipline of protecting all three.” |
Pause. Breathe. Pick the one or two things that matter most. Then hold the line.