Prioritization is a Political Problem as Much as an Analytical Problem

Rich Mironov reveals the fundamental organizational disconnect in prioritization: the 'maker' side wants to commit to fewer things and finish important items, while the 'selling' side wants commitments for ALL important things. Spreadsheets and analytical methods alone cannot resolve these conflicting demands because each department has different priorities and executives have different perspectives on what's most important. Sales/marketing often see prioritization as 'getting everything we need' while engineering sees it as making strategic trade-offs. Mironov recommends political approaches including setting explicit top-down effort allocations across categories, requiring executives to provide short force-ranked priority lists, regularly recapping current projects to maintain organizational memory, using the 'Now/Next/Never' framework to discuss trade-offs, and defining clear boundaries for outsourcing work. Engineering leaders will learn that prioritization requires emotional intelligence, stakeholder alignment, and shared understanding of constraints—making trade-offs transparent and distributing the 'pain' of difficult choices across the organization rather than placing all responsibility on the product team.