How To Escape From the Prioritization Pitfalls!
Without a clear mission to pursue, teams will constantly run in circles.
Without a clear mission to pursue, teams will continuously run in circles.

It was summer; everyone was in a nice mood waiting for the CEO’s quarterly presentation. But everything changed once the CEO said:
“For this quarter, our priorities are: increase our growth-rate by 15%, develop a new acquisition channel at least 20% cheaper than our current average, implement a product recommendation feature…”
The list kept going for minutes. The Scrum Teams were shocked. We wondered, what should we do? The CEO has just too many expectations. The goals had no connection with each other. Collaboration would be impossible. We had to change this. Otherwise, frustrations would be inevitable.
Allow me to share with you how you can avoid such traps.
The Lack Of Vision Ensures Frustrations
A common problem among organizations is the lack of vision. Many companies invest time in defining a beautiful business mission, but it’s easily forgotten. The ultimate goal is often to increase revenue and profitability. Of course, companies need to survive. But what’s the purpose in the first place?
Product Owners should not work on something without a vision. It’s your responsibility as a Product Owner to define a compelling vision. And why is it important? A compelling vision inspires the team to dream of a brighter future. It gives them hope to achieve something more significant, challenging, but possible. John Kennedy did on May 25th of 1961.
“I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” — John F. Kennedy
Coming back to my initial example. We had no Product Vision. But we decided we had to craft one. Initially, the CEO didn’t support it. She said, we know what to do, we know our users, we don’t need sentences on the wall. But we, the Product Owners, thought differently. We needed a Product Vision. We wanted to have a North Start to follow. Otherwise, everything could arguably be the priority.
Without a vision to pursue, the Scrum Team becomes a feature factory.
Instead of accepting the CEO’s statement, we defined a bold product vision with the CPO and presented it to the CEO. We said, “That’s where we aim to be. Now, we need your support to get there. Everything that doesn’t put us a little closer to our vision won’t be done. We will focus on achieving our mission.” Of course, the CEO didn’t agree with that because she had multiple disconnected goals to achieve.
We were brave and told her, “We won’t deliver on your expectations. Without a clear direction, we cannot reach something meaningful. We need to focus on a precise goal. That means one single direction. It’s better to be honest with ourselves instead of bowing to unrealistic expectations.” After a long silence, she said, “Ok! But I want to see our numbers growing!” That leads me to the second part of this story.
Start With The End In Mind
The Product Vision is vital, but not enough. We know where we want to be, but we don’t know how to get there. The journey progresses as we acquire more knowledge, but an important question is: how do we know if we are on the right track? We need to start with the goal in mind.
Coming back to the story, once the CEO said, I want to see our numbers growing! The conversation got interesting. We explored the importance of increasing numbers; not surprisingly, some wishes were arbitrary. They had no meaningful reasoning behind it but to please shareholders. After a lengthy discussion, we agreed it was worth focusing on customer retention.
Our customer acquisition costs were too high. Yet, we often lost many customers. We were burning a lot of money. We had to find a sustainable way of getting new customers and keeping them. By realizing that, we defined what we could achieve and which KPIs to monitor.
Start with the end in mind. Which outcome do you want to achieve?
We thought our lives would be easier from that moment on. But we forgot stakeholders still had a lot of wishes, and they were not part of our conversations. Every day, stakeholders would pressure us to do something for them; they argued it was urgent and necessary. Once again, we couldn’t focus on what mattered the most.
Handling Endless Requests From Multiple Stakeholders
We had a serious problem; we would never reach our Product Vision working that way. Something else had to change. The wishes from stakeholders had no connection with each other, and many times they put us very far from our goals. We evaluated different alternatives to solve this problem.
We thought maybe the CEO could present our Product Vision to the stakeholders. Direction coming from the boss is always easier accepted, but then we thought, stakeholders will still argue their problems are more critical. The main problem was we couldn’t focus on our goals, and stakeholders didn’t care about it. That was the a-ha moment; we needed to make the stakeholders care about our goal.

As a Product Owner, I decided to invite all stakeholders to a discussion table. I name it as “We care about each other.” The discussion happened more or less like this:
David: “Over the last weeks, I’ve received many conflicting requests from all of you. For example, finance wants to change the invoices sent to our customers, while logistics wants to remove them from the packages. We cannot work like that. We need to be a team. Do you know our biggest pain currently? It’s bloody expensive to acquire customers, and we lose them very easily. My question, what can we do to change this scenario? At the end of this meeting, we need to agree on a single direction to go.”
The stakeholders were silent. Clearly, some of them didn’t agree. But the discussion went nicely. After I opened the round, finance stepped out, saying, “My request is not as important as this problem.” On the other hand, logistics presented multiple problems that led to delays, which could be a significant explanation for losing clients. At the same time, customer service couldn’t handle all the complaints received. The discussion went on as I observed and paid attention carefully.
At a certain point, the discussion boiled down to choosing between solving customer service issues or logistic issues. It all turned around when the stakeholders agreed to focus solely on logistics. The result was that stakeholders stopped bugging Product Owners because they understood each other's problems and could agree on what was worth solving at that moment.
Be a facilitator. Make the stakeholders care about each other.
Prioritization is a Hassle, but we can change it for the better.
Everywhere I worked as a Product Owner, I faced trouble with prioritization. Confusion was everywhere, and people were often frustrated because of false expectations. But, I never gave up on changing the scenario for the better. If you are bold as a Product Owner, you can make a real change. It’s a choice to either comply with the status quo or accept the conflict and fight to find working ways.
As the Product Owner, you are ultimately responsible for maximizing the value for the end-users and businesses. If the environment is not favorable for you, it’s your responsibility to fight for a change.
Don’t settle until you can fulfill your mission.
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