TBM 399: 10 Prioritization Traps - by John Cutler

Prioritization feels like a constant battle in fast-moving startups, where every second becomes a decision between "should-haves" and "must-haves." The author lists ten recurring anti-patterns that silently drain capacity, from reactive fire-fighting to endless polishing of low-value work. Recognizing these traps lets leaders stop treating every urgent request as inevitable and start carving out protected time for high-leverage effort.

The piece walks through concrete examples: "Burning Down the House" describes the high-urgency, low-value grind that keeps teams in reactive mode; the "Medium-urgency, medium-value" trap shows how work expands to fill the quarter without delivering real impact; "High-value, high-urgency" tasks fail when leadership does not explicitly allow teams to drop other work; "Death marches" linger without clear off-track signals; and the "Innovation" trap hides behind vague constraints that never translate to shipped value. Each scenario is illustrated with dialogue snippets that capture how teams rationalize waste.

For every trap the author supplies a "Do This Now" prescription: protect a slice of capacity for preventive work, force an early cut to ship the smallest learnable version, publicly name one activity teams can drop, pre-authorize follow-on investments after a release, introduce a hard off-track checkpoint, add an enabling constraint to innovation, quantify hidden drag in cross-team workflows, run low-cost experiments to reduce uncertainty, and maintain a small-batch pull queue of ready-to-ship tasks. By applying these concrete steps, technical leaders can shift from endless firefighting to disciplined, high-impact prioritization.

The overall argument is simple: you cannot eliminate every bad decision, but you can systematically filter out the majority of wasteful patterns, giving teams the breathing room to deliver real value and avoid costly crevasses.