TBM 351: The 4 Prioritization Jobs (And Why It Matters)

After all these years, I finally put something into words about prioritization.

The key insight was that humans jam four primary jobs into the prioritization discussion. These jobs are related—but they're distinct enough that conflating them really gets in the way of effective collaboration around prioritization.

Four Prioritization Jobs

In my experience, when people talk about prioritization, they're typically talking about one of the following:

Efficiency

They're trying to minimize context switching. They feel overloaded with high work in progress and are looking for something to help them focus. They feel "all over the place" and scattered.

I've got too much in flight. Every time I try to make progress, something else pulls me away. I know I'm not finishing things, and even when I do, it's taking longer than it should. I don't need a new priority—I need help reducing the noise. What can I drop, delegate, or delay? I just need a clear runway to focus.

Leverage and effectiveness

They're trying to figure out the right mix of work to maximize impact while minimizing risk and investment.

Are we placing bets in the right places, or are we just being busy? I don't want to just do things well—I want to do the right things—and ideally, the things that unlock value across multiple fronts.

Alignment and autonomy

They're looking for a shared context to guide collective decision-making. They're often met with X vs. Y discussions that could benefit from deeper context. They want decision-making to be more decentralized.

I can make decisions, but I'm not confident I see the bigger picture. I'd feel more comfortable making calls without escalating everything if we had shared context and a clearer sense of direction.

Support, funding, and commitment

How money, resources, and commitments come together. It's an extension of alignment, but at a deeper structural level—relating to investment, promise-keeping, and making clear commitments.

Okay, we say this is important, but where's the actual support? Who's committing to this with me? Are we funding this work appropriately? If I stick my neck out, will the organization back me up? Without that, this feels risky.

I've been doing product for a long time, and it wasn't until recently that I could distinguish these distinct conversations.

Example—Struggling Platform Team

A team is going through a rough spot. The original vision was to become a true platform team—but it feels like they'll never catch their breath. Everyone wants something from them. If they say yes, they get overloaded. If they say no, other teams work around them, creating more debt and friction for future migrations. There's no good way to make apples-to-apples prioritization calls on all the incoming work, so they either escalate to their manager's manager (who has to go find peer leaders and broker a painful, time-consuming tie-break), or they say yes to everything—and everything drags.

Here's this team thinking about our four jobs.

They can't catch their breath (#1)

We're overloaded. Context switching is killing us. We've got too much work in progress, and we're bouncing from one thing to the next. We need space to focus—but the requests keep piling up.

This is a conversation about efficiency. It's about minimizing context switching, reducing WIP, and protecting the team's ability to do deep, focused work.

They're not making progress on the platform vision (#2)

We were supposed to be building something foundational—a true platform. But we're stuck in endless tactical requests and patchwork fixes. We're not investing in the things that will actually pay off long-term.

This is a conversation about leverage and effectiveness. It's about ensuring the team puts energy into the highest-impact work and does not just react to whoever yells the loudest.

They want to make more decentralized decisions (#3)

We want to say yes or no confidently, but we're not sure what leadership actually wants. We don't have shared criteria, and every request feels political. So we escalate or say yes to keep the peace, and neither feels great.

This is a conversation about alignment and autonomy. It's about shared context, strategic clarity, and creating the conditions for smart, local decision-making.

They're unsure if the organization really supports their vision (#4)

This team pitched a platform investment. But where's the funding? Where's the protection when we push back? Are we actually resourced for this work, or are we just another shared service team with unrealistic expectations?

This is a conversation about support, funding, and commitment. It's about structural backing and whether the team has the sponsorship, headcount, and organizational will to follow through on the original promise.

Talking Past Each Other

One of the interesting things about prioritization discussions is how often people talk past each other. A discussion to address #1 (Efficiency) will look very different than a discussion around #2 or #3. And once you bring funding/budget into the picture (#4), it can be hard to pivot the discussion.

Another issue is that many prioritization discussions are a mess of all these "jobs" at once.

When you combine these discussions under the high-level banner of prioritization, it becomes very difficult to make meaningful decisions.

Example #1—High WIP vs. Impact/Leverage

Take the high WIP discussion. Technically, teams should be able to control their work in progress. In an ideal world, a team would simply say:

It's our job to be efficient and effective. Without extra guidance, we'll assume these items are roughly equal in value and flip a coin on sequencing. There's no sense trying to do them all at once.

They'd set reasonable goals. They wouldn't make wild commitments. They'd run a flow-based system optimized for getting stuff done. They'd surface tradeoffs clearly—without falling into traps like Tetris-playing or pretending to make precise allocation commitments that create confusion. I'm intentionally removing discussions around leverage, autonomy, and budget. Assume you aren't getting more budget. Call it like it is.

You can absolutely have a solid, effective #1 conversation—just about efficiency—without trying to solve the rest. Is that ideal? Wouldn't digging into impact, strategy, and autonomy be better? Sure. But those are different conversations. And even if you do have them, you're still going to need to solve for #1.

Example #2—Funding vs. Impact/Leverage

Now, let's take a different situation: a team that wants to have a conversation about funding—but instead, they're stuck in a loop around leverage and investment mix.

From the outside, it sounds strategic.

Which bets will yield the most? How do we balance short-term wins vs. long-term foundations? What's the best use of this team's time?

But in the back of their minds, the team is thinking something much simpler:

Do we even have enough people to make any of this work? Or are we being asked to do the impossible again?

They're being pulled into cost-benefit framing. They're being asked to "prove the ROI" or "show that the platform unlocks X." But they can't shake the feeling that it's all just polite theater—because the underlying issue hasn't been addressed:

Is the organization actually willing to invest in this? Will we be resourced accordingly? Or is this another case of high expectations with no structural support?

So instead of discussing real constraints—headcount, staffing, long-term funding—they're being asked to optimize within a box that's already too small. This is what happens when a #4 conversation (support, funding, commitment) gets misdiagnosed as a #2 conversation (leverage and effectiveness).

Could the team engage in a leverage discussion? Sure. Would it be helpful to explore high-impact opportunities and smart sequencing? Of course. But if they skip over the structural question—are we truly resourced for the thing we're being asked to do?—then it becomes an empty exercise.

Example #3—Above the Line. Below The Line

I worked at a company once that loved talking about "projects being above or below the line." The basic idea was that you'd line up projects, initiatives, or whatever in a sequence—sometimes based on priority, sometimes assumed delivery order—and then draw a line. Everything above the line would get done with the available budget for a given year or time period. Everything below? Maybe next year. Maybe never.

What this set up, of course, was an endless game of wrangling:

But if you did this and that together, could you squeeze in that other thing?

Then someone would chime in with "the art of the possible," which usually meant pitching everything you might do if you got more funding and working backward to justify a bigger ask.

Eventually, most conversations boiled down to:

We can't give you more money but still want everything.

You can probably already see why these conversations got so dysfunctional. They combined all of the prioritization jobs—but in strange, overlapping ways:

1. Flow. Someone would point out, "We can't even get to the bottom of the list—our pipes are clogged.

2. Leverage. Others would challenge the list: "Are we even sure this is the right list? Is it strategically aligned?"

3. Autonomy and resolution. And always, always: "Did you pitch outcomes or projects?"—with blurry assumptions and tradeoffs hidden beneath the surface.

4. Funding. A leader might say, "Oh, you want that item this year? Then we'll need to revisit the budget."

In theory, the above-the-line/below-the-line framing was meant to create clarity. In practice, it often masked misalignment, set up political maneuvering, and collapsed four distinct conversations into a single, confused process.

All Important. No One Sequence

Each of the discussions is important:

• You can have structural support, clean flow, and empowered teams—but without a clear sense of leverage, you'll be doing the wrong work efficiently. Eventually, people will ask, "Why does any of this matter?"

• You can have a great strategy, focus, and empowered decision-making, but without real support, you'll stay underpowered.

• You can have strategy, support, and a clean flow, but if teams can't confidently make local decisions, things slow down.

• You can have strategy, support, and autonomy—but nothing moves if the pipes are clogged.

Multiple prioritization jobs in one system.

But there isn't a single correct sequence for these conversations. It varies with context. Two common sequences that come to mind:

Leverage → Support → Autonomy → Efficiency

You could reasonably order them like this:

• Leverage and effectiveness (#2). Start with "Why." What matters most? What should we be aiming for?

• Structural support and commitment (#4). Make sure the resources are in place to support that direction.

• Autonomy and decision-making (#3) – Create the conditions for teams to act on the strategy without waiting for constant approvals.

• Efficiency and flow (#1) – Help teams make tradeoffs and maintain momentum at the front line.

This is a completely valid progression. You define the strategy, align investment behind it, deploy it through empowered teams, and optimize execution. For many companies, this sequence works well.

Efficiency → Autonomy → Leverage → Support

But I'd argue that in some organizations—particularly ones where the pipes are badly clogged and teams are overwhelmed—you may need to take the exact opposite approach.

In those cases, the most important move you can make is to stabilize first.

• Limit WIP (#1)

• Provide first-pass heuristics to reduce thrash and help teams make tradeoffs (#3)

• Once teams can breathe, then you can start to surface and clarify strategy, goals, and outcomes (#2)

• And only then does it make sense to revisit how your funding is allocated and how structural support is distributed (#4)

It's almost the reverse of the classic model. But the key insight is this: clearing the pipes is the strategy when you're stuck and nothing is moving. That's not a tactical choice—it's a strategic one.

The key point is that context will dictate which jobs you tackle and when.

Conclusion

The first thing any team can do is take time to discuss the four jobs of prioritization and why each one is valid in its own context. Rather than defaulting to vague or overloaded conversations about "what's most important," it helps to clarify what kind of prioritization you're trying to do.

Are you trying to improve flow, make better tradeoffs, push for more strategic alignment, or clarify what's supported and what isn't?

From there, you can start to notice when your prioritization conversations are doing too much. Maybe you're stuck in a recurring deadlock where no one can break the tie. Maybe you're pushing for more autonomy, but the decision-making context just isn't there. Maybe it's actually about structural support—who funds what and how real those commitments are. Or maybe it's a leverage conversation disguised as something else.

Whatever the case, name it. Each job brings a different need and a different set of tools.

It also helps to surface weak spots. Maybe things are flowing smoothly, but no one really knows if the work is doing anything. Maybe leadership keeps saying, "Why not both?"—but it's never clear what tradeoffs are being made. Maybe the team has autonomy but not enough clarity to use it. These are all signs that one of the jobs is being skipped or left implicit.

I'll leave you with this: a lot of the pain around prioritization comes from not being clear about which conversation you're in. We mash together strategy, budgeting, decision rights, and execution flow—and then wonder why things feel so hard. If you can learn to separate those threads and name what's being worked through, prioritization becomes much more manageable.

Questions To Ponder

If you want to go deeper, here are a few questions to reflect on or bring to your team. They're meant to surface hidden dynamics, clarify which "job" you're actually working on, and make prioritization more intentional.

• Given these four jobs, why do you think there's a persistent tension between the front line and leadership regarding focus and limiting context switching?

• Which one of the four jobs is your company's biggest pain point right now? And based on that, what's the right sequence for addressing it?

• What's an example of a meeting, artifact, or workflow in your company where it's unclear what prioritization job you're trying to satisfy?

• Do you ever find yourself asking a question for context—and having it misinterpreted as a question about one of the other jobs? Why does that happen?

• What makes tradeoff discussions difficult in your company? Is it about flow and multitasking? A lack of clear strategy? Budget ambiguity? Something else?

• When you engage others in prioritization conversations, are you clear about what you actually need from them?

• Do you really have a prioritization problem? Or is it a feedback loop problem—or an unspoken issue with your strategy that makes every decision harder than it should be?