TBM 381: Stop Trying To Make Prioritization Easy

Prioritization is meant to be a hard problem, not a smooth transaction. When it feels easy you're missing a key tension that keeps teams honest about trade-offs. The piece argues that the difficulty itself is the signal that you're wrestling with the right constraints.

The author breaks the problem into three pillars: the ambition of what you want to achieve, the allocation of existing capacity, and the decision to add new investment. Focusing only on ambition leaves you in fantasy land, over-committing and eroding trust. Concentrating solely on perfect capacity fitting produces immaculate plans that grind on low-impact work. Adding money without testing current capacity throws resources at unfocused dreams and hides operational messes.

The sweet spot is balancing all three. Good teams can answer "if we got a million more dollars, what would we do?" while still having a bias for impact within current limits. This tension forces resourcefulness and keeps the conversation about trade-offs alive.

Prioritization is a continuous dialogue, not a one-off framework. Frameworks help marginally, but the real work is keeping the tension between limited capacity, limited capital, and ambition alive. Optimizing only one piece-whether it's capacity or new hiring-leads to subpar outcomes.

The closing thought reminds leaders that money is the easy part; turning capital into valuable software requires confidence in the team and disciplined stewardship. Adding headcount rarely fixes core issues and can obscure the real problems you need to solve.