Prioritize brutally, discretely but not strictly!

I am fond of meaningful contradictions, and I’ll use this one to kick off my second stream of blogs posts, this one about leadership and management (the other being sustainability). Prioritizing brutally is obvious but sometimes we confuse that with prioritizing strictly. When asked to prioritize, teams often look for a strict order which has the appeal of absolute clarity. As example, when working on a product, a strict prioritization of regulatory compliance first, followed by security and quality, then customer satisfaction issues, then new features seems to make sense. But it leads to a suboptimal outcome. Progress needs to be made on all four buckets and prioritization is not strict at the topmost bucket level. A “prevent loss of customer data security fix” might well take precedence over a “regulatory compliance to enable sales to a specific segment”, even though the compliance bucket is at the top. Again, this is obvious, right? But there is a third element — prioritize discretely. Otherwise, progress will be made on multiple fronts, but progress is not the same as completely meeting a bar or a scenario (95% compliant is still not compliant). It is better to be fully compliant in one market than to be almost compliant in three! <a href="https://medium.com/@kampung.boy/prioritize-brutally-discretely-but-not-strictly-1eb520fe6e5e">Visit Now</a>