lidenskap.blog

"We need to prioritize better...", a phrase often heard when costs increase and resources become more constrained.

Ah, so it's that simple?

Prioritization means arranging or doing things in a particular order, while prioritization is the process of doing so. It’s obvious what it is, but not how to do it.

Everything we prioritize is a bet, meaning we make an informed decision to allocate our resources to one thing over another, despite uncertainty.

This is necessary because there will always be more work than there is capacity to execute. No matter how many talented people you have, you’ll never have enough to do everything. If everything is important, then nothing is important.

Unfortunately, there’s no magical formula for how to prioritize, and it’s rarely as simple as a mathematical exercise.

It's a constant balancing act between running and improving what already exists, pursuing new strategic bets, and weighing short-term gains against long-term impact.

There are many frameworks and techniques, but for me, it boils down to a collective judgement. A discussion between relevant disciplines, key people, and stakeholders.

Evaluate ideas in relation to each other. Compare and contrast. Which of these do we believe will have the biggest impact on our strategy, customers and business? How much effort and resources do we think it will require from us? Can we afford it as things look today? What are the consequences of not doing it? How confident are we in our assumptions?

To prioritize, we need filters. This is where strategy and goals come into play. What is it that you want to achieve, and what is the strategy to get there? If this is unclear, the prioritizations will suffer.

Without a clear sense of direction, it becomes difficult to determine what tasks are most important.

Where does it get difficult? If you want to do more of something, you must do less of something else. Pausing or stopping ongoing initiatives is crazy hard. It’s always easier to spin a story explaining why continuing is better than stopping.

Our cognitive biases and lack of clear thinking doesn't help. Prioritization has a human element. It's emotional. Our feelings take over.

We prefer to keep things the way they are.

We feel uncomfortable with loosing what we have. When something we like is (or threatens to be) taken away, we often value it higher, aka Loss Aversion.

We have a tendency to continue because we have invested resources in it, such as time, money, or competency, aka Sunk-Cost Fallacy.

The scarcer common resources become (money, capacity), the more territorial behavior we get. It's a self-preservation mechanism inherent in all of us.

So what can we do?

First, widen your options. Downgrading one of many is easier than if you only have one or two ongoing. With only one option you become too invested. You take it personally.

You ask yourself "How can I make this work?" instead of "Is there a better way? What else can we do with the same time and money?"

With a portfolio of options and activities, it's easier to step back and look for patterns. Which initiatives repeatedly create value? Where are the dependencies and synergies?

Second, shift your perspectives. It's very hard for us to see the world from outside our own perspective.

An example is the thought exercise Andrew Grove went through with Gordon Moore before committing to making a massive change in Intel's business: "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think they would do?"

When we think of our colleagues or peers, we see the forest. When we think of ourselves, we get stuck in the trees. Ask yourself, "What would I tell my colleague to do in this situation?"

One of the best tools to get an outside view to improve your prioritization is to get other people's perspectives. But don't share your opinion first. Provide what the person needs to know to give valuable feedback, like what you try to accomplish, and nothing more. 

"What would be your process for prioritizing if you were in my shoes? How would you go about doing it?"

Third, set, in advance, guardrails and "tripwires" to snap us out of autopilot. These are signals that make us reconsider a prioritization. Signals that tell us when to jump and take action.

An artificial deadline is one example of a tripwire. Other examples include performance indicators, budget caps, behavioral patterns, and time-based reviews or check-ins.

Fourth, start talking about the opportunity cost. Limited resources always have alternative uses. Opportunity cost is what you give up when you make a choice. It's the thing you can't have because you picked something else.

The cost of using a limited resource for a specific activity, can be measured as the value or opportunity lost by not using it for a better alternative.

Opportunity cost can challenge the comfort of the status quo and make the cost of inaction more visible. You can highlight that continuing a low-value activity means sacrificing higher-value opportunities.

You can shift the narrative from "stopping an activity" to "investing in something better."

How do you prioritize?

My key takeaways from Naval Ravikant

• Ironically, when you do things for their own sake, you create your best work. Whether it's business, exercise, romance, friendship, whatever, the meaning of life is to do things for their own sake.
  
  
• Learn to sell (marketing, communication, recruiting, selling to customers), learn to build (design, development, manufacturing, logistics, procurement). If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.
  
  
• The means of learning are abundant - it's the desire to learn that is scarce.
  
  
• Figure out what you are good at, and start helping other people with it. Give it away. Trying to build business relationships well in advance of doing business is a complete waste of time. Show your craft, practice your craft, and the right people will eventually find you. Karma works.
  
  
• The smartest people can explain things to a child. If you cannot explain it to a child, then you don't know it. Smart thinkers are clear thinkers. They understand the basics. If you cannot rederive concepts from the basics as you need them, you are just memorizing.
  
  
• Read what you love until you love to read. Just read for its own sake. The better the book, the more slowly it should be absorbed. If you are confused when reading you are building your mental muscle. Just as the pain you get in the gym.
  
  
• We constantly walk around thinking, "I need this", or "I need that", trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
  
  
• Not all of us have the ability to say what is going to work. Rather, try to eliminate what's not going to work.
  
  
• For someone who is early in their career (and maybe even later), the single most important thing about a company is the alumni network you are going to build.
  
  
• Value your time. Time is all you have. It's more important than your money. Its' more important than your friends. It's more important than everything.

When I was younger, I felt guilty if I wasted time away from my desk and tasks at work. It felt like I took the foot off the gas pedal.

Now that I'm older, and (somewhat) wiser, I have a different view. Now I believe we should work more in line with the lifestyle that is natural for our species.

There's a price to pay if we don't. It stresses us. We push ourselves to the edge of exhaustion. And I'm not as productive as I thought I was.

Humans have spent 99-ish % of our evolutionary history in the hunter-gatherer environment. Hunters and gatherers are good at resting after the effort of securing food.

Watch a nature video of any animal escaping from a predator. The prey sprints away at top speed. If it gets away, it just stops. It's body shakes to let go of stress hormones, and then it resets itself back to baseline.

My resistance training has taught me that the recovery days are just as important as the training days, as that is when the body and muscles adapts and becomes stronger. Failing to schedule in enough recovery leads to overtraining, and eventually illness or injury.

There's a pattern here. Sprint, rest, repeat.

I now believe what matters for my performance (and well-being) is not the number of hours in front of my computer; it's how focused my work is, and how quickly I get back to my baseline.

On an ideal day, I work as a lion. Sprint, rest, repeat.

Work focused and intensely for short hours, rest, and repeat, rather than low-intensity office hours somewhat stressed or somewhat relaxed all day long. It's the idea of a combination of extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle.

Easier said than done. Our attention is being fought for by every new meeting, e-mail, request, and initiative. Our focus muscle must be built and improved little by little.

I get back to my normal by resting and taking better breaks. Even micro-breaks of five to ten minutes are enough to reduce fatigue and raise energy.

Take outdoor walks. Sit next to a tree, garden or the sea. Get up and refill your water. Take three deep breaths. Lie down on the floor, and close your eyes. Be completely still. Imagine yourself back in time to a peaceful place you've been and be there for a while. Do some push-ups or air squats to burn your adrenaline.

When you rest properly, then you are not “doing nothing." You get a chance to reflect on and form your own beliefs, judgements and values.

Throughout the ages people have found that outdoor walking offers an additional benefit - time and space for better work.

Breaks are not a distraction. Your passion keeps the problem or task active in the back of your mind, and you are more likely to incubate fresh ideas and unexpected solutions.

It may sound controversial, but in the times we live in now, "doing nothing" has probably never been more important.

In my opinion.

John Deere, the farming technology company, encourage product managers and software engineers from urban areas to actively go out and see farmers in action.

They send their people to a fully-functioning farm set up a few miles from the office to learn more about farming.

This is what it means to be customer centric. Knowing that the most important thing you can do to create great products is to deeply understand your customers.

When you do not understand your users' problems well, you cannot possible define value for them.

In product-led companies, this is baked into the culture.

It's about avoid ending up in the build trap where we measure value by the number of things we produce instead of associating value with the outcomes we want to achieve for our business and users.

Products and services are not inherently valuable. It's what they do for your customer or user that has the value - solving a problem, or fulfilling a need or desire.

• A great product manager understands the market, how the business works as well as the company vision and goals.
• A great product manager has deep empathy for the users of the product.
• A great product manager needs to be strategic enough to help craft the vision of the product and a strategy to get there, but tactical enough to ensure a smooth execution.
• A great product manager works with the team in developing and validating ideas and in marrying business goals with the user goals to achieve value.
• A great product manager says things like "I think the most costly thing we can do is build this product without knowing it's the right product to build. How do I test it and ensure that this is actually what we want? How do I become more confident that we are on the right path before I invest money in this?"

Easy? No. This is a discipline that must be mastered as a career. You need to develop the skill set through experience and practice.

What's the value of water? It depends on how thirsty you are.

Something that is worthless to one person or organization can be of immense value to someone else. Value is in the eye of the beholder.

Value can be the importance, monetary worth or usefulness of something.