One list to rule them all - by James Stanier

The word priority was singular for 500 years. It meant the one thing that comes before all others. Only in the 1900s did we start talking about priorities, plural, and that linguistic shift mirrors exactly what's broken in most organizations today. Multiple priorities give us permission to avoid the hard work of actually deciding what comes first. You get parallel roadmaps fighting each other, teams with their own P0 backlogs all demanding more people, and engineers spread thin across everything while finishing nothing.

A single prioritized list is a forcing function that makes the pain visible. You cannot put two items in the same position. Someone has to decide which comes first, and moving something up means moving something else down where everyone can see it. This externalizes the debate - the argument becomes about the list, not about individuals and their opinions, which turns prioritization into a rational exercise instead of an emotional one. The discomfort you feel when forcing a ranking is exactly the discomfort you've been avoiding by letting everything be equally important.

The evidence is everywhere. Peter Thiel at PayPal insisted every person could only do exactly one thing, and he refused to discuss anything else with you except your current number one initiative. Amazon built single-threaded leadership where leaders are entirely dedicated to one initiative with no competing responsibilities - that's how they built Kindle and AWS. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he eliminated 70% of their products and focused on exactly four computers. People think focus means saying yes to what matters, but it actually means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.

Without a single list, you get predictable symptoms. Silos form because teams optimize for their own backlogs and guard their own resources. Engineers get peanut buttered across too many projects. Decision fatigue sets in because every resource allocation becomes a negotiation. The companies that move fastest aren't the ones with the most resources - they're the ones that know what comes first. The difficulty of creating the list is the point. That difficulty is the hard prioritization work you've been avoiding.