TBM 374: Strategy & Urgency

This is a post about strategy and prioritization, and how reframing urgency can help you be more strategic AND prioritize more effectively.

Urgency

Urgency is the degree to which a delay reduces the long-term value of a decision or action.

Imagine your company is competing to "tip" a market. The first player to reach 30% share gains momentum and has a much easier path to 50%+. In this case, delays matter a lot: every month you wait, the competitor moves closer to locking in an advantage, and high switching costs make it harder to catch up later.

Now compare that to expansion revenue. Suppose you're weighing investment in new products for upsell. If you miss this year's renewal season, the opportunity isn't gone forever. You'll likely have another solid shot next year. The urgency is lower because the long-term value isn't diminished as much by the delay. In many cases, it's better to land customers now with the basics and expand over time.

Unless, of course, you're on the hook to the market for a certain ARR growth or NRR target, and the company risks missing earnings guidance, taking a credibility hit with investors, and seeing a big stock price drop. In that case, the expansion revenue might suddenly become much more urgent. Other potentially higher-leverage things will have to wait (unfortunately).

Strategy and Urgency

Strategy is as much about when you do things as it is about what you do. Strategy is heavily concerned with timing and the impact of timing on leverage (urgency). Is it better to act now and benefit from the first mover's advantage, or wait to act decisively with more information? Will the technology mature faster or slower? When will the early majority catch up with the early adopters? Should you go broad first, or deep first?

But "timing" isn't the whole picture. Strategy is also about controlling the tempo and shaping pressure and response windows. You might speed up the market with rapid launches and aggressive signaling to catch competitors unprepared, or slow things down by pushing regulation, dragging competitors into protracted feature-vs-feature or pricing battles, and disrupting their rhythm so they're forced to react on your terms.

In our example above, the company facing its next earnings call is forced into acting sooner than it would have liked. The urgency is regrettable. Whereas a company acting proactively (and with a "sense of urgency") to lock in key partnerships before competitors dominate the channel or customer acquisition costs spike is exhibiting proactive urgency. Their urgency now will open up options later.

So what?

Which brings me to two observations:

No Strategy!

Many people complain about their company's lack of strategy or inability to prioritize. What they often miss is that the ship sailed years ago. The situation they are in right now is a form of regrettable, reactive urgency. They have no choice but to try to do everything, build one-offs for customers, and punt on platform work. That, in effect, is the strategy. Competitors and investors are dictating the reality. I'm not saying strategy doesn't matter—it absolutely does. But in these moments, your strategic options are sharply constrained.

Urgency?

I find it fascinating that none of the popular prioritization frameworks explicitly address the impact of time on value.

• RICE and ICE don't. MoSCoW doesn't—unless "must" really meant "must right now."

• Kano hints that today's delighters become tomorrow's must-haves, but doesn't dig into the timing question explicitly.

• Frameworks that mention "risk" leave the door open for timing risks, but rarely name them explicitly.

• Buy-a-Feature could surface urgency if you asked, "How much would you buy it for now vs. later?"

• Even WSJF/Cost of Delay–Duration, which nods most directly to urgency, often reduces timing to a single number rather than grappling with how value can decay, compound, or shift depending on when you act.

Why? We obviously think about it. If we're doing it now, then someone believes it is more important to do now than later, right?

I have a theory about this. In product development, we often connect "urgency" to regrettable urgency. We imagine the salesperson making an urgent feature request to close that "amazing logo" (with little regard for long-term strategy or platform health), or the last-ditch effort to make a quarter, hit unrealistic investor expectations, or paper over execution failures with a flashy win.

We spend a lot of time arguing for more strategic, slower-burning bets over reactive, short-termism. And in many cases, the ship has already sailed, and there's not much we can do about it.

In other words, we equate urgency with being anti-strategic, when in fact time and the impact of timing on outcomes are a huge part of strategy.

But I think there's a big opportunity here.

Prioritization is often filled with debates about value. What is more valuable? What is more impactful? What is our confidence level? Will it take two weeks or three weeks? When you weave in discussions about time and the impact of time on value, you have an opportunity to shift the conversation towards something more strategic.

• What is the window of opportunity?

• Where will we benefit from waiting?

• Where can we safely wait?

• How can we control tempo in our favor?

• What must we do to shift from regrettable, reactive urgency to proactive urgency?

• Will that opportunity be available in a couple of months/quarters?

• How are our views on timing different from those of our competitors?

• What can we do to instill a sense of urgency in our competitors?

• What bets can we place now to put time on our side in the future?

• What can we do to delay convergence in beneficial ways?

In many cases, we discover that these questions are a far bigger factor than we imagine. The team has already filtered for "valuable" (or potentially valuable) things. Instead of jumping into overblown estimate precision to yield a "winner", we start layering in our strategic assumptions around urgency as our north star for prioritization.