How to prioritize like a chess player

Using the Elo rating system for project management

You are working in a startup or a larger, growing, company. You have ambitious objectives. You have a hundred ideas on how to attain them. But you have resources to build two, maybe three of them.

Does that sound familiar? That problem is part of the daily life of working for any sort of growing project: you’ll have to drop the vast majority of the ideas you come up with to focus on only a couple. The solution is of course to rank all of these ideas so that you can focus on the most promising ones. Lots of frameworks for that exist, with a favorite of mine being ICE, where each idea gets rated for Impact, Ease and Confidence.

But that can get tricky. Evaluating the ease to implement a hundred different ideas, or their expected impact, is a process fraught with subjectivity. The results you get may be inconsistent, or the task may become overwhelming. That may lead you to drop prioritizing altogether and just work on what seems to be important now.

But as Tinder has taught us, while picking the best out of very many options is very hard, making a yes or no decision on one option is much easier. This is something that can be leveraged to create global rankings, if used in conjunction with the Elo rating system.