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
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Opening your mouth wide can help manage overwhelming emotions at work, preventing public breakdowns.
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Prioritization drives all organizational work and is the key to innovation and effective problem solving.
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Big-eye innovation changes entire systems, like the elevator, whereas small-eye innovation improves everyday details, like nail clippers catching nail clippings.
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Not all problems are equal; strategies vary from trivial fixes to epic-scale unsolvable challenges.
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Organizations often struggle balancing urgent-and-important tasks with important-but-not-urgent long-term investments.
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Mike used horizon-based prioritization: Horizon 1 focuses on current business needs, Horizon 2 supports growth foundations, Horizon 3 invests in future innovation.
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At All Clear ID, investing in technology and process improvements was critical to support rapid growth after years of urgent firefighting.
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Creating a transparent prioritization framework with stakeholder input builds alignment and buy-in for difficult tradeoffs.
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Priorities must be clearly categorized and force-ranked using agreed-on criteria to enable effective resource planning and roadmapping.
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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."
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