Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
Prioritization for designers and product managers (1st of 3 seminars)
Summary
This is part 1 of a 3-part series on prioritization, led by Harry Max, author of Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions. Part 2 | Part 3 Prioritization is a deceptively tricky topic that lurks behind the scenes but informs everything. It’s a fundamental skill for organizations, teams, and ICs, and most people accept that it’s essential, but we are not taught how to do it. You can prioritize almost anything, not just goals, projects, and tasks; values, for example. Our main challenge is finding new methods to reach goals amongst multiple teams with conflicting priorities. There is some good news: there is a repeatable process model. And some approaches are better than others, especially for organizations and teams. This conversation will take the topic to a new level. It will also help you gain a profound new level of clarity about creating better plans and making smarter decisions.
Key Insights
-
•
Prioritization is often confused with personal productivity or time management, but it applies broadly to resource allocation within teams and organizations.
-
•
Top organizations manage prioritization intuitively even without explicit frameworks, by knowing what matters most and making tough trade-offs.
-
•
Priorities are not legitimate until they are properly prioritized by assigning measurable attributes and values to items for comparison.
-
•
Different levels of abstraction in prioritization require framing, such as comparing streams of small tweaks as a whole against large complex projects.
-
•
Having multiple simultaneous priorities is possible; urgency and value profiles differ, so forced ranking is often impractical.
-
•
Prioritization is as much a continuous process involving revisiting assumptions and adapting to new information as it is a one-time decision.
-
•
Clear ownership of prioritization responsibilities is essential to avoid confusion and ensure accountability in decision-making.
-
•
Confusing prioritizing work items with prioritizing customer segments or goals leads to misalignment among product and design teams.
-
•
Overprioritization without clarity leads to 'lack of a priority' problems, causing teams to spread resources thinly and reduce effectiveness.
-
•
Effective prioritization balances setting strategic direction with practical resource capacity allocation and must handle trade-offs gracefully.
Notable Quotes
"There’s a huge gap between theory and practice when it comes to prioritization in complex dynamic environments."
"Priorities aren’t priorities until they’ve been prioritized with attributes and values; otherwise they’re just items."
"It’s actually very hard to prioritize things that are apples versus oranges without framing them similarly first."
"People often confuse prioritization with sequencing – understanding relative importance is one thing, but when and how you do things matters too."
"If all 50 items are said to be important, you can’t do them all at once; starting randomly is better than stalling."
"Most teams have way too many false priority ones – their number one priority is the lack of a priority."
"Ownership means anticipating, observing, orienting, deciding, acting, and monitoring – there has to be a clear owner for these phases."
"Prioritization is as much about saying no gracefully as it is about saying yes to the right things."
"If you spend 15 out of 62 business days prioritizing and still don’t have a clear list, you’re probably prioritizing at the wrong level."
"What am I avoiding? Asking that every day turns out to be a surprisingly powerful prioritization tool."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"With how of work now separated from where we work, the design process stays the same—thinking holistically for all personas and touchpoints."
Lavy Kumar Kat Temple Shan Sebastian Tara Jensen Jenn ChouFuture of Work
June 9, 2021
"The complexity of automating marketing content for agents varies because some want hyper-personalized brand content while others prefer general automation."
Andreas Huebner Amy Takata Craig BrookesWhat Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?
March 11, 2021
"Conjoint analysis was used by Apple and Samsung to determine the financial value of specific product features."
Ricardo MartinsUnlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods
March 12, 2025
"Everybody involved in product making should have empathy for each other, not just for the customer."
Monty HammontreeThe Future of UX Research
December 3, 2020
"The design ops team helped designers print in BBA’s complicated systems, something they had to do alone after we lost the ops team."
Benjamin RealShowing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team
October 21, 2020
"Culture often makes the biggest difference in how research ops works across industries."
Kate TowseyAsk Me Anything (AMA) with Kate Towsey
April 2, 2025
"Pilot projects with evangelists inside the company make ethnography manageable and successful."
Steve Portigal Chris Chapo Kelly Goto Christian RohrerDiscussion
May 13, 2015
"There isn’t necessarily a conflict between security and accessibility; it’s a matter of thoughtful design."
Sam ProulxOnline Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience
March 28, 2023
"Consistency between control labels and prototype instructions matters a lot, because mismatches can cause big problems for alternative navigation."
Sam ProulxPrototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You
October 1, 2021
