Objective Prioritization is Impossible

The prioritization of anything complex must be a collaborative process.

The Idea Prioritization Funnel

“If you don’t have a plan when you hit the beach, you are dead. If you don’t change the plan the minute you hit the beach, you are dead.” — Unknown Navy Seal

According to Dictionary.com, the first two definitions of Priority are listed as:

1. The state or quality of being earlier in time, occurrence, etc.
2. The right to precede others in order, rank, privilege, etc.; precedence.

We use it a little differently in the software development industry.

Prioritization is the art of combining everything we think we know about the past with the fixed resources we have right now to predict the order in which to do things to improve our collective future.

It is complicated, imperfect, and messy. The most powerful prioritization schemes are those which align our teams and empower them to make better decisions. There are many models which intend to help us prioritize in a more objective and data-based way. These frameworks try to balance value, cost, and various risks. This rarely works because it is nearly impossible to capture, in any objective way, all of the possible…