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Ruthless Prioritization

What is it?

If everything is considered top priority, then nothing actually is. Ruthless Prioritization is an ongoing practice of determining the most critical uses of your team’s resources to maximize value and impact, while deliberately getting rid of tasks that don’t. There are numerous plays and exercises to help make decisions, but at its core Ruthless Prioritization is a mindset that should be omnipresent across your team and regularly demonstrated to stakeholders.

How is it any different from prioritization?

The key component that makes prioritization ”ruthless” is the intentional deprioritization of tasks and projects that provide lesser value and/or impact. Instead of ordering everything that needs to be done into a stacked list and eventually doing it all, Ruthless Prioritization emphasizes only doing the things that matter the most, in other words: the pursuit of doing less.

Why do it?

  • Deliver the most value and impact to your users/customers
  • Reduce task saturation and context switching loss
  • Trim lengthy requirements lists from your stakeholders by working with them to only focus on what matters most
  • Keep planning cycles shorter and have a smaller backlog so you can tackle newly identified high value opportunities