Prioritization & Urgency: Key lessons from John Cutler’s Prioritization Course

Hey I’m Ant and welcome to my newsletter where you will find practical lessons on building Products, Businesses and being a better Leader

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My day job is helping companies shift to a Product Operating Model.
My evening job is helping product people master their craft with Product Pathways.

This week’s post will make you rethink prioritization through the lens of urgency.

We know that urgency is an important dimension, just think of the popular Eisenhower matrix but how often are you explicitly taking it into account?

As John Cutler elegantly framed in his course ‘How to Run an Effective Prioritization Activity’; few prioritization methods explicitly call ‘urgency’ out.

*Credit:* *John Cutler. Slide from* *Effective Prioritization Workshop Course*

It’s implicit in RICE, ambiguous is MoSCoW and non-existent Value x Effort.

Not great when you consider that urgency can often be the deciding factor in prioritization.

Here’s the analogy John Cutler used in his course to illustrate this.

Imagine you’re a hotel. There are so many things you need to juggle. From fixing structural issues to building that new pool area.

Whilst the new pool area is new and exciting. Those structural repairs are urgent. If they’re not fixed soon there could be fines, lawsuits or worse!

And whilst it may not be the most valuable thing in terms of customer experience or revenue, it’s a ticking clock.

The longer we delay the worse it gets and the risk increases.

What I liked about this and how John framed urgency is that it’s a very approachable way of introducing cost of delay without having to introduce a new concept and vernacular.

Urgency Changes Over Time

Ok this blew my mind because I never thought about it this way.

Taking this all one step further, urgency also changes over time.

To give an example, I’m working with a founder 1-on-1 at the moment who has a seasonal business.

In other words, his business has a ‘season peak’, an on and off season.

Examples of seasonal businesses are:

Travel companies as holiday season rolls around.
E-commerce with the seasons and events like Black Friday sales/Christmas.
Finance with tax fillings being a major event.

When the peak season rolls around, urgency to do specific things will increase.

Post the season something that was super urgent could now wait until next year.

Therefore it's important to recognise that urgency is dynamic and will change over time.

4 Dimensions to Prioritization

The workshop got me reflecting now what are the key attributes we should be considering as part of prioritization - because we know it's more nuanced than 'value over effort'

This got me looking at a bunch of different prioritization frameworks and what I realised was that it really boils down to these 4 dimensions:

Value (or if you’re like me and prefer the framing of Impact)
Effort
Urgency
and Confidence

So perhaps the uber-Prioritzation formula is = Value, Effort, Urgency and Confidence.

Quick I better trademark U-RICE or VUCE!

Me trademarking and registering the web domain 'VUCE'

‘Akubra Jonno’s’ Prioritization Activity

*Sorry John! But had to include this… or should I say sorry Jonno!*

I’ll address ‘Akubra Jonno’ first.

During the workshop, John and Carey did an amazing role playing how the prioritization activity works - it was great to see it in action!

To role play they put on hats to signify that they were in character. John wore an akubra that was gifted to him by an Aussie company.

Akubra’s are a famous (and expensive) brand of cowboy style hats here. They’re an aussie icon. My day still proudly wears his ~50 year old one every day around the yard (for the record, my parents live semi-country so it’s not like he’s standing on an apartment balcony with it on although I’m sure he would!)

The akubra meant that it was only natural that the mostly aussie audience gifted John’s character an aussie name and hence ‘Jonno’!

Ok on to the activity.

The core of the course was learning how to facilitate this prioritization activity that John had created.

The prioritization activity is designed to be collaborative and to surface the right questions/assumptions.

It’s broken down into several steps to keep things manageable. Focusing on determining urgency first. Then value and so forth.

I liked the activity because:

It’s lightweight
Has a low barrier to entry. I could see running this with teams, execs, prioritization newbies, my kid even!
And gets you doing advanced concepts like COD (cost of delay) without you even knowing it

A few things worth noting that separates this from others:

It seemed optimized for shared understanding and unearthing the right conversations – which is great and makes it flexible to any context.
Works off estimates/ranges over hard data – not a bad thing. John backed this up with evidence that our intuition is usually enough to compare and decide. This makes the activity rapid.
Works across all work types – from large strategic bets to small fires.

“The "magic" in this framework is not that it will do your research, tell the future…make perfect decisions every time… Instead, the magic is…triggering the right conversations… The right conversations yield better decisions that stick.” – John Cutler

For a deep dive into the activity and how to facilitate it, I recommend jumping on John’s course. Given its low cost, I think if you take one thing away from the course it’s worth it!

If you’re interested in the course I threw some more notes below.

What to expect from John Cutler’s Effective Prioritization Workshop

It’s a 3 hour live course. Run virtually off Maven through zoom and off a Miro board (which you honestly don’t need to open. You can follow along from the shared screen).

There were about 50 of us on the call and the content was focused on learning how to facilitate a prioritization workshop that John has developed during his time at Amplitude and have successfully run with dozens of teams.

Who do I think will get the most out of the course?

I actually think Agile Coaches, Product Coaches, Product Ops and anyone who’s in a position of helping product teams, product managers wrangle prioritization would get the most out of the course.

Second to that would be Product Managers. More specifically I can see an activity like this being very impactful for Product Managers in companies where prioritization requires input from stakeholders. Perhaps even, stakeholders are the ones who ultimately drive the priority - this could be great to facilitate with them!

Do I recommend it?

Yes. And sure I may be biased but here’s two reasons why it was a clear ROI for me:

It adjusted my views on prioritization.
I walked away with a new tool in my toolkit.

Well spent!