Ruthless prioritization: A startup’s best friend

Prioritize work to minimize opportunity cost. This prevents you from only pursuing incremental futures. In each quarter how much time to allocate incremental ~ 60%, to big new initiatives ~30%, to guidance & infrastructure ~10%.

Judging by the sea of SEO thirst-trap blog posts about prioritization, you aren’t a PM blogger (or PM SaaS tool) if you haven’t shared your perspective on prioritization. So here’s my advice: In most situations, ignore most of these frameworks and just keep it simple: 1.  Make a single list of all your team’s ideas. 2.  T-shirt-size (XS, ... See more

6. Great PMs ruthlessly prioritizes, both the team’s work and their own

"High-medium-low" doesn’t scale. At four or more tasks, you’re forced to start doubling down on designations or to create subcategories of priorities. Eventually, you find yourself with a bucket of “high priority” projects wherein you don’t know what to tackle first.

What does a poor Product Strategy Stack feel like?DIFFICULTY PRIORITIZING

Some ways to build this habit:Say no. Or, “not yet.” Try using the phrase “ruthless prioritization” when prioritizing as a team, or saying no to an ask.Align with your team and your manager on a single prioritized source-of-truth roadmap.