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Hendriktotoday at 1:09 PM4 repliesview on HN

What marketing/sales/HR types don’t seem to understand is that when everything is the highest priority, nothing is.


Replies

dwedgetoday at 1:24 PM

I saw someone had an idea to have a ticket system where the user chose the priority, and it displaced the current ticket at that priority, with the catch being that this ticket was sent back to the user with "are you sure?"

CEO can't login during a demo. Sandra from accounting can't print from the closest printer and confirmed this is higher priority

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bandramitoday at 1:33 PM

Early on in my career my manager told me "a monitoring system that sends more than a dozen notifications a day actually sends zero notifications". Words to live by.

xnorswaptoday at 1:22 PM

This is a bit off topic, but I always say that priority is a ranking of actual demands, it is an ordering, one that needs curating and keeping updated based on context and changes in environment.

Nothing else works for prioritisation, any other categorising into "High/Medium/Low" just fails.

By doing so you end up with the nonsense we had at a company I once worked for, where stories were all put in medium.

This was because stories in low were simply never actioned, they'd never ever get done, everyone came to implicitly understand this. It was still a useful dumping ground for the kinds of stories you know you ought to do, but no-one wanted to do, but it was useful to have noted on record. But for prioritising actual work, it was useless.

Stories in High had a special process defined in a handbook that no-one wanted the hassle of dealing with.

So everything was Medium.

This had obvious problems, and it grew larger than could be managed.

So "Just Above Medium" was born, for stories that were higher priority than your everyday stories in Medium.

This in time grew too, so "Just Above Just Above Medium" (aka JAJAM) was born.

By the time I started, there was even a "JAJAM+" category, for stories that had to be fast-tracked through the process too.

The whole thing essentially fell back to having the product/development leads come to an understanding of what work needed to be done. Which is the right way to do it, but that should simply be made more explicit and part of the process by simply having all stories ranked.

Then you don't need the mental overhead of trying to decide in a design meeting if something is "Just above Medium" or just above that...

sheiyeitoday at 1:22 PM

But it is MY highest priority!