Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Priority Zero: Some Things are More Equal than Others
Gold
Thursday, June 9, 2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Share the love for this talk
Priority Zero: Some Things are More Equal than Others
Speakers: Harry Max
Link:

Summary

In this talk, Mike recounts his journey transforming prioritization practices at All Clear ID, a breach response leader. Drawing on his experience as an executive coach, he introduces a simple emotional regulation technique useful during high-stress moments. He then shifts to discuss prioritization as a critical strategy in innovation and organizational success, contrasting big-eye innovations like elevators with small-eye innovations like nail clippers. Mike highlights the tension between urgent and important work, referencing Maria’s contributions to focusing on long-term investments. He presents a horizon-based investment model—horizon one for current operations, horizon two for growth reinforcement, and horizon three for future opportunities—and explains how it helped All Clear ID balance day-to-day crises with building future products. By engaging widely with stakeholders and iterating on a whiteboard prioritization framework, Mike aligned diverse priorities into clusters of technical debt, defects, features, and process improvements. This transparency led to clearer decision-making, resource allocation, and a major board-backed investment to rebuild the company from the inside out. Mike concludes by advocating for blunt but optimistic leadership that inspires teams and clarifies the path forward.

Key Insights

  • Opening your mouth wide can help manage overwhelming emotions at work, preventing public breakdowns.

  • Prioritization drives all organizational work and is the key to innovation and effective problem solving.

  • Big-eye innovation changes entire systems, like the elevator, whereas small-eye innovation improves everyday details, like nail clippers catching nail clippings.

  • Not all problems are equal; strategies vary from trivial fixes to epic-scale unsolvable challenges.

  • Organizations often struggle balancing urgent-and-important tasks with important-but-not-urgent long-term investments.

  • Mike used horizon-based prioritization: Horizon 1 focuses on current business needs, Horizon 2 supports growth foundations, Horizon 3 invests in future innovation.

  • At All Clear ID, investing in technology and process improvements was critical to support rapid growth after years of urgent firefighting.

  • Creating a transparent prioritization framework with stakeholder input builds alignment and buy-in for difficult tradeoffs.

  • Priorities must be clearly categorized and force-ranked using agreed-on criteria to enable effective resource planning and roadmapping.

  • Effective product leadership requires blunt honesty combined with optimism to inspire confidence and forward momentum.

Notable Quotes

"Open your mouth as wide as you can and let all the energy out to stop yourself from crying in public."

"Priorities drive everything; even unspoken ones shape what work gets done."

"Big-eye innovation is like the elevator that changed cities, while small-eye innovation is like nail clippers that catch nail bits."

"The problem is not the problem—that’s something I explored more in a TEDx talk."

"If we could do everything important, we would, but attention and resources are always limited."

"Urgent and important tasks pull us away from important but not urgent long-term investments."

"Apple manages multiple S curves by starting new innovations before old ones run out of steam."

"I rolled my little whiteboard around, talking to fifty people, iterating what needed to be done and where things fit in the horizon model."

"We put together a roadmap that showed what it would take and went to the board, which wrote the biggest check in ten years."

"People will follow you if you're clear, confident, and help them see a future that moves them away from fear."

Ask the Rosenbot
Joshua Noble
Casual Inference (Videoconference)
2023 • QuantQual Interest Group (Rosenfeld Community)
Kurdin Bazaz
Culture, DIBS & Recruiting
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Robert Fabricant
Industry junctures: Paths forwards for UXR and the critical decisions that get us there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Sam Yen
Driving Organizational Change Through Design? Do more of this and less of that
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Husani Oakley
Theme Three Intro
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
William Newton
How to Lead With Data, and Without Data
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Janelle Estes
UX Research Trends (Videoconference)
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Jorge Arango
[Demo] How to re-categorize content at scale using LLMs
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Sam Ladner
How Research Can Drive Strategic Foresight
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Margot Bloomstein
Fostering Trust in Your Brand and Beyond (Videoconference)
2020 • Enterprise Community
Xenia Adjoubei
Empowering Communities Through the Researcher in Residence Program
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
John Cutler
The Alignment Trap
2023 • Design in Product 2023
Gold
Sofia Quintero
Beyond Tools: The Messy Business of Implementing Research Repositories
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Sean Dolan
A Practical Look at Creating More Usable Enterprise Customer Journeys (Videoconference)
2019 • Enterprise Community
Peter Merholz
Design at Scale is People!
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
Lessening the Research Burden on Vulnerable Communities
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold

More Videos

"Doctors hate using EHRs because it turns them into clerks, interacting more with machines than patients."

Standardizing Product Merits for Leaders, Designers, and Everyone

June 15, 2018

Simon Wardley

"I realized I was just making it up despite the company’s growth."

Simon Wardley

Maps and Topographical Intelligence (Videoconference)

January 31, 2019

Sandra Camacho

"Designing for the dominant default ignores people whose identities are marginalized or excluded."

Sandra Camacho

Creating More Bias-Proof Designs

January 22, 2025

Darian Davis

"We’re all capable of creating and perpetuating toxic work relationships."

Darian Davis

Lessons from a Toxic Work Relationship

January 8, 2024

Fisayo Osilaja

"We mitigated data privacy risks by subscribing to the corporate plan for ChatGPT, which offers enhanced security."

Fisayo Osilaja

[Demo] The AI edge: From researcher to strategist

June 4, 2024

Uday Gajendar

"Working with CEOs like Mark Templeton is like Dancing with the Stars — an interpretive dance of translating fuzzy ideas."

Uday Gajendar

The Wicked Craft of Enterprise UX

May 13, 2015

Davis Neable

"Service blueprints would have helped business units understand backend impacts and responsibilities."

Davis Neable Guy Segal

How to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team

June 10, 2021

Eniola Oluwole

"If you come with a big idea, they’ll try to dial you back to the smallest iota you can test first."

Eniola Oluwole

Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site

October 24, 2019

Aurobinda Pradhan

"Product managers feel design is a black box; they want visibility, transparency, and accountability on timelines."

Aurobinda Pradhan Shashank Deshpande

Introduction to Collaborative DesignOps using Cubyts

September 9, 2022