If Everything Is a Priority, You’re Managing Noise…Not Strategy

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Leadership   Strategy  

Spend enough time in project or product management, and you’ll eventually hear someone say “All these things are high priority.” Every request is critical, every feature is urgent, and every team claims to be totally blocked until their work is completed.

It starts with good intentions; people want to move fast, deliver value and support customers. But when everything is urgent, nothing is truly a priority. And when nothing is prioritized, you aren’t leading, you are just reacting to noise.

This is where a lot of PMs get stuck. They confuse responsiveness with effectiveness. They think being a good partner means saying “yes” to everything, which leads to bloated roadmaps, chasing down a never-ending list of side quests and items of dubious value, and churn on the team. This causes people to lose focus, struggle to deliver, and suffer an erosion of morale that is hard to recover from.

The truth is, if you don’t make the hard decisions, someone else will—and they won’t be considering the roadmap, your team's availability, or possibly even your business need. They’ll be focusing on their own metrics, deadlines, and the visibility of their project or initiative. This is how strategic efforts are hijacked by noise.

Leadership as a PM means a lot more than tracking Jira tickets and unblocking urgent requests …

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