Mastering Intentional Prioritization for Complex Organizations

In this episode of UX Leadership by Design, host Mark Baldino speaks with Harry Max, author of the book "Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions". We discussion the importance of intentional prioritization, particularly in complex organizational settings. Harry explains that while many people think they are good at prioritizing, most struggle when faced with dynamic and adaptive environments. He introduces his DEGAP process model (Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize), which offers a structured approach to prioritization, ensuring that decisions are made based on the best possible options. The conversation also touches on the challenges of gaining team and organizational alignment and the significance of making prioritization a deliberate and strategic activity.

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritization Needs Intentionality: Successful prioritization requires a structured approach, especially in complex organizational settings.
• DEGAP Process Model: The DEGAP model (Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize) provides a comprehensive framework for effective prioritization.
• Importance of Strategic Alignment: Aligning teams and gaining executive support are crucial for the success of any prioritization effort.
• Recognizing the Need to Prioritize: The first step is deciding whether prioritization is necessary in a given situation, considering the potential benefits and risks.
• Prioritization as a Skill: While people may be good at prioritization in simple environments, complex settings require more refined methods and tools.
• Outputs vs. Results: Focus on achieving better results by selecting the best possible options rather than just prioritizing tasks.
• Avoiding Pitfalls: Without intentional prioritization, organizations risk making decisions that do not align with their strategic goals, leading to inefficiencies.
• Scalability of Prioritization: Effective prioritization processes can scale from individual teams to entire organizations.
• Designing for Flexibility: The prioritization process should be adaptable to different contexts, stakeholders, and organizational needs.
• Building Consensus: Engaging all relevant stakeholders in the prioritization process ensures that the outcomes are understood and supported across the organization.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction and Background
• 05:19 The Importance of Prioritization
• 11:39 Prioritizing Prioritization
• 19:43 The DEGAP Process Model
• 22:19 Aligning Teams and Achieving Organizational Success
• 29:23 Gaining Executive Alignment and Getting Traction

Links:

• 20% Discount Code to Buy the book "Get the book - Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions".  Use Code "UXLBD" during checkout at: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/managing-priorities
• Hary on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrymax
• harrymax.com

Fuzzy Math: fuzzymath.com

Mark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markbaldino/

Transcript

Mark Baldino (00:01.902)
Hello and welcome to UX Leadership by Design. I'm your host, Mark Baldino. I'm also the co -founder of FuzzyMath. FuzzyMath is a user experience design consultancy that brings consumer grade UX to business applications for B2B and enterprise tools. Today, I speak with Harry Maxx, the author of a recent and very important book called "Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions". So we all prioritize, right?

or at least we know we should prioritize. But do we take prioritization as seriously as we take other things? Say the UX design process. If I had to place a bet, I would say we don't. And I'm guilty of this as well. But I think what you'll learn today is that Harry advocates for and explains that we need to be intentional about prioritization.

that there is this full process, a foundational and repeatable process that you should actually do before the actual event of prioritization. Think about it as the UX process that happens before you get to the UI. But we don't stop there in the conversation because with sort of the how and why of prioritization, we also discuss how to get the individuals around you, your team excited, engaged, and bought into the process.

and then how you can go broader than your team and gain traction organizationally and amplify your efforts and gain executive and leadership sort of alignment. I think the book is great. I think this conversation with Harry is really, really enlightening. And I just want to say, if you're interested in the book, after listening to the episode, we've included the discount code below and I would encourage all of you to go grab it. So as always, thank you for listening and enjoy the episode.

Mark Baldino (00:01.425)
Harry, welcome to the podcast.

Harry Max (00:03.85)
I'm glad to be here. Thanks so much, Mark.

Mark Baldino (00:05.809)
Now, I appreciate your time. We're going to get into a little bit of your background and the book for which you're an author of, which is Managing Priorities, How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions. And as I mentioned in our little pre -chat, you've been very busy running workshops and talking about the book. So I'm super excited for my audience to learn more from you over the course of our conversation here. But maybe just for starters, you can give

the audience, just a little bit about your background and then I'm really curious about what made you decide to write

Harry Max (00:45.796)
Yeah, certainly. I mean, in terms of my background, I've had the great fortune of working for fantastic companies like DreamWorks and Apple and Hewlett Packard and Rackspace. On the large side and on the small side, I've been intimately involved in about a half a dozen startups and probably loosely involved in probably 50 or 60 more. And then everything in between. So I have this broad background

that sort of touches on product design and development, technical documentation, strategy development and deployment, both as an internal employee and as a consultant and now as an executive player coach where I'm kind of a fractional product lead typically, and then also do executive coaching from within that role. Interestingly, the book kicked off because when I was

product design executive at Rackspace, which is a hosting company in Texas. And I had been invited to give a talk at South by Southwest on problem framing and diagnostic thinking. And it turned into a longer presentation. It ended up as a TEDx talk. I got invited to USAA. Luke Holman invited me to Innovation Games Summit in Adobe. And I was talking about this topic.

You know, people didn't seem to be terribly curious about it. But in that talk, I touched on the topic of prioritization and all the hands went up and I'm a product guy at heart, right? I'm like, how? That's a demand signal. And, and I went back and started looking at the literature. I, you know, searched for books. didn't find very much. I mean, I found a ton of stuff that talked about how important it was. And I found awesome resources, you know, where

Mark Baldino (02:26.033)
enjoy.

Harry Max (02:34.852)
books and whatnot had like a chapter here or a section there or a blog post here or whatnot. But there were no books on the topic that addressed it and end holistically as a thing. And so I called a friend of mine who's a publisher and said, Hey, you know, found this really strange phenomena. Um, and I can't find a good book on prioritization. He said, you know, that's, that's crazy. And so he went and looked and said, you know, you're right. You should write it. And I thought, Oh, a piece of cake. Uh, that was 2015.

Mark Baldino (02:59.95)
Thank you.

Okay. Well, congratulations on getting there. It sounds like you kind of did a little bit of the sort of like product strategy research process, which was you kind of had a listening device out there you weren't aware of and then you dove in to explore it. But I just want to pause and say that's amazing that you couldn't find a holistic, comprehensive end -end book on prioritization because

Harry Max (03:04.612)
It just came out, so it was

Mark Baldino (03:33.757)
Everyone, I shouldn't say everyone. The vast majority of people I know in my work life prioritize or have done prioritization and people do it extensively in their personal lives as well. And so the idea that there wasn't a guidebook out there is shocking, but also it kind of makes sense. So what do you think about, I know 2015 to 2024 is a long stretch and frankly the world's changed a lot in that time,

Harry Max (03:39.842)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Mark Baldino (04:02.439)
What about this time and place? Like, why do you think people need this end -end comprehensive book on prioritization?

Harry Max (04:10.198)
Frankly, I think it's even more important now than it was when I started looking at it because one of the takeaways from having written the book and talked to so many people about the topic is that, you know, everything I look at now looks like a prioritization problem or prioritization challenge or prioritization opportunity. And, you know, if you think about your priorities, those are not your decisions. Your priorities are your options and they become your inputs to your plans and your decisions. And even when you look around,

You know, you start to see the world through this lens of, wow, we need better options. We need to know which ones are more likely to lead us in an intentional positive direction. And we still need to use our judgment to ultimately make a decision about what we're going to do, where we're going to invest, how we're going to execute. But it's a lot easier to do that if you've sort

winnowed away the stuff that's not as relevant and you're left with the stuff that you know really your better options so that you're you you have the option to choose the best options among the good options rather than you know the best options among the worst ones.

Mark Baldino (05:19.079)
So do people think they're doing prioritization now and they're actually not, or are they kind of doing it wrong? Maybe I want to put words in your mouth and suggest you think people are doing it wrong, but like, I prioritize things, but maybe I'm not thinking about it appropriately. Like, what's the gap between what people are doing now and kind of what's as best practice as you should call

Harry Max (05:28.772)
you

Harry Max (05:40.514)
Well, funny you stepped right into it, right? Because of course the method that I outline in the book is called DGAP, right? Is to get rid of the gap. And no, I think people are brilliant at prioritization. The thing is, is we're brilliant at prioritization in simple static environments. And we're terrible at prioritization in large organizational complex dynamic adaptive environments. So by and large, I think we're quite good at it,

Mark Baldino (05:51.245)
Thanks.

Harry Max (06:06.05)
We don't know what we don't know. as the world around us is more complicated, and as we step into our, you know, sort of work lives, it immediately starts getting unwieldy and hard to do. And, you know, we've got our go -to frameworks or sorting techniques or methods that we've got the stuff that we use in our personal lives and in our professional lives. It's sort of like, what worked before, but is, is that the best way? Probably not. There

more consistent, more repeatable approaches. There are better sorting techniques and better marketplace simulations and better hybrid methods. If you don't know what they are, you're not going to use them. So it's kind of a long -winded answer, but that's kind of how I think about

Mark Baldino (06:50.413)
Not at all. I mean, I think it's great. And I want to point out that there's kind of an appendix in the book, which is the methods, you know, and kind of how -to's and best practices there, but that's not the core of the book. And I want to get into this sort of dynamic environment when you're prioritizing within a team and how to make traction there and then how to get organizational traction. like, if prioritization is done,

correctly, what are the proper inputs and what are the proper outputs or what are we getting out of it at the end of the day if done

Harry Max (07:26.52)
Yeah. So, I'll start with what you get out of it, right? What, what you get out of it. I'm a big fan of Annie Duke's book, thinking in bets, right? And one of the reasons for that is she makes some clear distinctions between the outcomes, which are largely things you don't have a lot of control over and the results that feed those outcomes, which are things you largely do have controls over, control over and the, the decisions and actions that feed those results. And so the thing is, is what comes out of it is typically.

results and What feeds those results are the activities you engage in and the decisions that you've made that feed those activities, right? and so if you're if you have a set of options and you choose the one you choose whatever options seem like they're gonna make the most sense in a given circumstance you're more likely to get a more intentional better result, so What are the results look like? Well, the results are fed by I know this gets a little esoteric but outputs like a PowerPoint deck or

or a spreadsheet or a tool where you have, know, Jira, whatever it is you're using to, there are hundreds of tools, for actually articulating what your, you know, your ordinal list of potential priorities, how those have settled out. And so the output is, you know, your options and those options feed your decisions and your decisions feed whatever it is that's gonna happen.

Your inputs to that are, I call them items, right? They're potential priorities. They're not priorities until they're prioritized. so people often talk about what are our priorities? No, what are our options or what are our items? It's really a better way to think about it. So coming in the front, you've got, in a given circumstance, you've got items that you need to prioritize. And they can be in any category,

You can prioritize people, right? You can prioritize stakeholders, for example. went to Bruce McCarthy and Melissa Apples. They had an event last night where they're releasing their new book, Aligned, on stakeholder management, right? I was thinking this morning, what was I going to write on LinkedIn about that? I'm like, well, know, prioritize your stakeholders, right? And you can prioritize people. You can prioritize locations. You can prioritize tools. You can prioritize work. Anything can be prioritized.

Mark Baldino (09:23.324)
Yep.

Harry Max (09:52.316)
And people tend to fixate on work or projects or tasks or products or features or whatnot, but that's not the scope. So the inputs are whatever items in whatever circumstance you have. You can prioritize symptoms, right? Medical thing or, you know, organizational thing where there's problems and you're looking for, you know, what are the telltale signs of what's not working well? You can prioritize anything. And in the middle of that is the prioritization process. And then the output

Mark Baldino (09:58.669)
Yeah, tasks.

Mark Baldino (10:17.925)
Thank

Harry Max (10:22.026)
or what comes out of that process are options in some kind of ranked way.

Mark Baldino (10:28.957)
Great. And you mentioned you think people are great at prioritization. Do you have a sense

I like the analogy to like an agenda of a meeting. Everyone knows if you, I think even research shows, if you have an agenda to a meeting, it's going to be a more efficient use of everyone's time. But no one puts agendas in meetings or they ignore agendas in meetings for the most part. If we know we should follow more consistent methods, we should look beyond what we've done for the past two years, that there are best practices out there.

Why do people ignore that? And maybe this is a hard question to answer. And I'm just kind of curious, you spend a lot of time in this prioritization. It's like, everyone knows they should do it and probably knows they could do it better, but they end up not and they fall back on previous tendencies, which maybe is just human nature. But if we're actually really good at it, but we're kind of thinking about it maybe a little bit wrong or aren't always doing it, or we're hyper focused on like task management prioritization, what do you think's behind that? And again, I know this is kind of a, maybe this is an

Harry Max (11:39.044)
Well, that's actually a great question. And of all the things I've done, nobody's asked me that one over the last couple of weeks. Funny. And I do address this directly in the book, right? And it gets to the heart of the first few chapters in the book where I say we have to prioritize prioritization, right? We have to make prioritization itself a first -class citizen. And the way that you do that is you first decide whether you need to prioritize, right? So I have this method DGAAP, D -E -G -A -P.

I'll explain what the acronym stands for in a minute. I didn't invent it. I just discovered it and named it and it's in the book. And it's not all that complicated. But the point is, is the first step in the process is decide if the benefits of being intentional about prioritizing are going to outweigh the potential costs or risks of doing it ad hoc or not doing it at all. And there are some very, very quick cheats for determining whether you need to do it. For example, I like, what can star model, right?

Is it, are you starting something new? Are you trying to do a turnaround? Are you trying to align something for, you know, increasing success? Right. Are so on and so forth. So I lay that out in the book. There's like a checklist, right? do I need to prioritize quick? Go through the, this list of things. Are any of these circumstances real for me right now? That those are clues that you might want to tap the brakes just a tiny bit and, and, and slow down to be more intentional because you're more likely to get a better outcome.

And for, know, the sort of tried and true Eisenhower matrix, you know, urgency versus important popularized by Stephen Covey, right? Well, you know, if you've, if you've got something that's really, really pressing urgent medical situation, somebody's, you know, it been an accident, they're dying, right? Do you want to sit there and go through a prioritization process? Well, maybe, but not likely. You might want to move quickly. You might've been trained to react, in a, in a, in a very productive way. So no.

But if you've got something that's got a more strategic impact, so you're in that realm of urgent and important, right? You can say, huh, maybe I just slow down a little bit, ask myself the question is being intentional here going to yield a better result? If the answer is yes, do I have the time? If the answer is yes, okay, tap the brakes a little bit. I'm not saying you need to get all bureaucratic about it and take a long time. I'm saying slow down just enough to be intentional about

Mark Baldino (14:05.853)
Can I just applaud you for writing a book on a topic and then suggesting people go through a process where they might not actually use the rest, not the rest of the book, but like, it's so interesting because I think when people, I'm not an author, I have a lot of respect for people who write books because I imagine it's an insanely challenging process. I think a lot of people, I'll use the design method or design thinking, right? If that's what you've learned and you're stepping into

you know, I'm running a consultancy. So we're working with a new client and we're going to lean on design thinking or human centered design. Like we're going to push it and they've hired us to do it. Right. But there's this step back of like, not just what they need, but do they need it? And I think a lot of people have struggled with that. Right. And so I just want to applaud you for saying the first thing you should do is be intentional about this. And you might decide, as you said, that the cost benefit, the prioritizing prioritization actually says in your environment, this isn't something you should invest

but you should be open to investing in it and investing in it the right way. think it's a really, I just think it's, I appreciate it because it's not a pitch. It's actually saying to do this right, you should decide if you should do it at all within your organization. And I think

Harry Max (15:17.035)
Yeah. Thank you.

Mark Baldino (15:19.655)
So you mentioned a de -gap before, would love for you to kind of walk through that process a little

Harry Max (15:26.668)
Yeah, absolutely. so DGAP is an acronym for D -E -G -A -P. Think about any circumstance. There's a current as is state, which is informed by the history of whatever's led to this moment. There's probably a desire to be state, right? There's probably some gap between what's true and what you would rather be true. Right? So if you want to close that gap, how do you do

Well, you want to D -gap. So I get to be all clever about it. But here's the way to think about it. And I talk about this in the book. Prioritization, prioritizing, it's an overloaded term. It's a term like, and in the book I talk about it, it's a term like animation. Or what I don't talk about in the book, it's a term like skiing.

Mark Baldino (15:58.973)
I like

Harry Max (16:23.032)
And I'll use skiing as the example here. Skiing is not simply lean forward, slide down the hill, right? Skiing is about, do you have the right gear? Skiing is, are you cross -country skiing or are you downhill skiing? Skiing is, do you know how to interact with the ski patrol? Skiing is, do you actually know what you're doing? Are you competent? And how competent and how capable? Skiing is, you know,

a whole set of skills and capabilities and a mindset for being out of control in a slightly, in a self deceptive, but fun way. And like I learned this in DreamWorks when I was working there. Animation is not just animating the character. Animation, especially in a CG, like a computer generated 3D animated film like Shrek 2, which I worked on. And I was just a small cog in a very complex system.

animation is this complex set of steps and major phases, if you will. Well, prioritization is the same. And I didn't know this until I started working on the book on it. Prioritization is not just prioritizing. Prioritization is deciding whether it's a good idea. So D decide, right. And there are some ways to think about that. If you think, if it turns out you in your wise, in your wisdom, decide it's a good idea, then you want to engage in the process to get traction.

Okay. Who are the stakeholders? What is the circumstance you're in? What's at stake? How should you be thinking about the situation? Okay. Once you've started doing that, then you start gathering the items that you want to prioritize from those stakeholders, right? D, E, G, gather. And you want to understand what's important about those items. So the criteria, is there metadata associated with them?

What is the stuff you need to gather and how do you put it all together? and then once you've gathered it, you need to arrange it. Right. So, okay. You might have duplicate. So you de duplicate. You might have things that are vague. want to sort of disambiguate and clear things up. You might want, okay. Take the kinds of items that you have, whatever they happen to be. You might want to evaluate them at a high level against the dimensions or the criteria that you're thinking about. for example, urgent versus important

Harry Max (18:49.966)
cost versus impact or whatever it happens to be. And then pick a sorting technique like paired comparison or pick a framework like print the product tree, a visual framework or pick a marketplace simulation. Like, I always forget the name of this one where you're betting with money, fake money. You're making choices and you're doing trade -offs and.

Anyway, it's one of Luke Holman's fabulous techniques and the name always alludes me and I should write it in front of me so I remember it. And I use it. just never remember what it's called. And, or some complex hybrid technique like HP, which is really heavyweight, right? And you really want a purpose built tool. See in the arrange phase, it's like clean up your, know, clean up the stuff you've got to figure out what you're going to do. You don't actually prioritize till P, D gap D E G A P.

That's where you run the process. And so just like animation, just like skiing, just like any verb that actually implies a significantly larger set of activities, the act, the fact of doing the thing is not sort of wholly representative of the specific phases that go into it. Design is a perfect example

Mark Baldino (20:10.481)
Yeah, it is. of course my brain goes there because I've been designing my whole life. people, I think design, and I think you could say the same about prioritization, you mentioned stakeholder management, right? People think design at the end of the day is you're getting a UI, whatever I can feel and touch and see is kind of the end deliverable. But the power of that deliverable is kind of two components. One is that you followed a process to put it in foundation so you're not just designing.

anything, but you're making purposeful decisions. And it's also something that moves stakeholders along. is give people a visceral response to, know, I could put a persona together or journey map and people might look cool. We can reflect on it. We can do opportunity identification. But when you put a UI in front of somebody, they have this visceral response. really does move teams and get illicit and get teams moving together. And that's really, really powerful. But that's what people think

design is the UI at the end of the day. And I think you haven't said this, but I think a lot of people place the emphasis first and foremost on the activity of prioritization and then what I'm going to get out of it, which is kind of some fancy matrix. And it's like, that's the visual I'm going to put into a deck. The same as the UI is a visual I'm going to put in a clickable prototype that's going to move people around. But without a thoughtful, coherent process to get there, it's not going to be kind of as powerful. And I do want to talk

Harry Max (21:17.401)
Yep.

Mark Baldino (21:34.951)
two chapters in the book kind of towards the end of it, I think are really interesting and kind of alluding to them along the way, which is it's one thing to run it purposefully. It's another thing if you're working with a client or within an organization to kind of get alignment around being purposeful with prioritization. And, you know, one of the components is kind of how are you getting, or one of the chapters is really around like team alignment and driving that forward. And then how you gain organizational success

and get traction within a broader company. And so I'm just kind of curious if we can spend a few minutes talking about those two components in terms of like getting the media group around you and then getting the larger organization to embrace these methods and get some amplification from

Harry Max (22:19.106)
Yeah. So I mean, just stepping back a tiny bit to set some context, know, the, the, the, the implicit thesis of the book is like the best organizations prioritize pretty well. And those, those organizations rely on teams that typically do a better job of prioritizing than companies that don't do it as well. And those teams are composed of individual contributors and frontline managers and personnel that actually do a pretty good job of figuring out what matters more versus less. And all of that gets synchronized, right. And they become more effective at doing it. So the book.

The book says, okay, let's talk about making the case for prioritizing prioritization. Let's look at the DGAAP process model. Then let's look at what does it mean from the point of view of individuals? What does it mean from the point of view of teams? And what does it mean from the point of view of organizations? So from a team's point of view, the sort of one of the core messages in the book is it really doesn't matter so much what method you use so long as everybody's bought into the process.

Right? You want to bring people along with you and get them engaged in the process and figure out whatever methods or techniques you're going to use. Because if people feel like they're part of the process, the outcomes matter a lot less. Because people will figure out how to deal with, you know, if they've made a bad decision, they'll make another one that's better, hopefully, and so on and so forth. And you scale that up and it becomes really complicated. So the middle of the book, which looks at teams, you

focuses on a visual framework like Speedboat, which is really on aligning the team around what's slowing it down, what could speed it up, what are the risks, and so on and so forth. then I move into what does it mean for teams. for folks in product design and development, the second chapter on teams is probably going to seem pretty standard. It's like, does it mean for teams to prioritize in a repeatable?

in repeatable or more continuous way. But then moving into the organization stuff, this gets tricky, right? Because, well, first off, a 200 -page book could never address prioritization at scale, right? The book could be thousands of pages long, because this is a complex topic. But what I did want to do is give people a perspective on, like, if you're in an organization, what are the telltale signs that prioritization is happening?

Harry Max (24:36.356)
How should you be thinking about it and how could you be participating in it? So Chapter 12 really focuses on, and I try to pick out like one method for each chapter to help ground the discussion. use, in Chapter 12, I use this prioritization pyramid. I call it the max prioritization pyramid because I sort of came up with it and I've used it multiple environments. It's particularly helpful where the base of the pyramid is sort of what's required to run the business now or where,

Mark Baldino (24:46.749)
I understand.

Harry Max (25:03.78)
things that have been investments that you've agreed on the top of the pyramid is where are you? What are your, what are your real convictions telling you are where the organization needs to go? And then how do you connect those two things across whatever categories like tech debt, new features and capabilities, process and automation, whatever it happens to be. And so I really focus on that and unpack a story around the application of that method there. And then chapter 13 really goes into

what does it mean that, you know, in, a larger organization, you have this problem of, know, like those Eastern European nesting dolls, right? You've got the big one, you've got a little one inside the bigger one, so on and forth. was turtles all the way down. Right. And it organizations, a larger organization is kind of the key challenge is that when you're in one of those organizations, it's like that, that David Foster Wallace thing, you know, the two fish go, the two young fish go swimming by and the older fish comes by and goes, Hey, how's the water?

Mark Baldino (25:41.671)
Yeah.

Mark Baldino (25:46.685)
stations.

Mark Baldino (25:51.932)
solutions.

Harry Max (25:59.748)
And the two young and then passes on and then the two young fish goes, what's water? Like when you're in a large organization, like prioritization is happening. If you don't know what to look for, you can't see it and you, and therefore you can't participate in it as intentionally and actively. And, uh, and therefore you may, you're not going to feel like you're bought into the process and therefore the outcomes are going to be worse. So what I'm trying to do in chapter 13 is say, look, here's how to think about prioritization at scale in a large organization. Here's a method

tried and true for at scale what it means when leaders have convictions to trickle those convictions down in terms of what they think priorities are, but make sure that gets all the way down to the ground level with the priorities discovery sprint. And it's called different things in different environment. Catch ball is the term that came out of TPS, the Toyota production system, the leader takes what they think the priorities are, they knock it down to the next level, it bounces back up and it comes back down two levels and so on and so forth.

You get all the way down to the ground level where you've got individual contributors and frontline managers who are interacting with customers, suppliers, lawyers, everybody. And they're like, no, no, no, we need to focus on this. And this gives you a method for aligning what leaders think needs to be done based on their perspective of what's going on in the world. They're talking to their stakeholders at a very high level with the perspective of what's going on at the ground level where the interface

with the world is actually happening in a very broad way. And then what methods might you use? in that chapter, I focus on a hybrid of sophisticated hybrid method called AHP, which is like proven to be like, damn near the best method to use in a large organization if you're going to be doing top -down style prioritization. But unless you know what AHP is and how it works, it's the whole thing's a mystery, right?

So I'm trying to unpack, I'm trying to demystify, I'm trying to unpack the mystery of what prioritization looks like at scale, whether you're actively involved in it or whether you're just sort of watching it happen around you. But I digress.

Mark Baldino (28:07.472)
Thank you.

Mark Baldino (28:12.781)
No, no, you're not digressing. think this like, I don't know, executive or leadership alignment is something a lot of people face, I don't know, struggle with, but it's this idea that like, no, leadership knows the priority. They've given us the priority. We are to execute. And in that environment, a line, a re -prioritize, I don't want to say re -prioritize, running through a prioritization exercise.

could seem frivolous or I'm nervous to put myself out there and say, we should prioritize. No, we have the top five things. We should go and do some research to understand what that means. We should do some interface design. We write some user stories. We should go build this. But we know that feature A is the top priority. And so like in that environment, if I'm working in that environment and I'm getting that sort of top -down messaging, like what is your advice for folks?

to actually make a case for prioritization or how should they be doing it? How do you, I mean, you don't have to explain every part of the message, what is that sort of top down? And then I think it goes down kind of back up in a slightly different format. Like how does that work if I feel like I've been given my top the five things to work on for the next six months?

Harry Max (29:22.916)
Right. Well, I think it's super important. And I'm actually consulting in an organization right now where the leader is like AI, AI, got to do AI, you know, put all of your 75 % of your engineering resources on AI. And I'm like, bad plan because 80 85 % of the engineering resources are currently supporting current customers. And therefore there's a gap, a ginormous gap of capacity that doesn't exist to actually work on

on the stuff that the CEO wants. If they were to, in an uninformed way, in an unintentional way, start shifting engineering resources in a dramatic way toward this highly differentiated new technology, stuff that is not real clear how it's going to benefit everybody quite yet, but they know it's probably where things are going, and they take their eye off the tech debt, paying down the tech debt, they take their eye off neutralization features that are

the work that the organization is doing just to keep up with competition, right? So they don't end up a year down the road and walk into a deal where a prospect goes, well, you don't have this one thing, which is a must have. It wasn't a different, some kind of key differentiation, but the likelihood that the executive is going to have any perspective on the functional risks or the excessive amount of highly interdependent work that's going on to keep the business just running.

is very, very low. And so it becomes incumbent upon the people that know that stuff to figure out how to communicate it in an effective way. Hey, look, we can do this, but we may not be able to do it right now. And here's why. We can do this. And making these trade -offs would cause us to put these other things at risk. Do you really want to err on the side of over -investing in this highly differentiated thing?

at the risk of losing all this potential revenue that we have that's guaranteed today from customers that know and love us. Well, who's going to surface those concerns? That type of stuff needs to be done in a methodical way. And that's where I see the prioritization process working really, really well when it's intentional. Because there are stakeholders, and those stakeholders effectively can be represented as personas, right?

Harry Max (31:46.774)
If you've got personas that have kind of current state operational understanding of what's required to run the business that have a perspective on things that these other personas are going to care about, might not be aware of. And those might be projects, they might be products, they might be features. Who knows what those things are? But if they're surfaced as potential priorities and they're evaluated against criteria that everybody agreed to,

in a method that everybody understands, you're more likely to be able to make intelligent trade -offs.

Mark Baldino (32:21.379)
Yeah, that's great. That's great. Thank you very much for kind of walking through that specific example because I think it's really real world. I think if you control your domain from top to bottom and you run a team, if I want, I'm a co -founder, if I want my team to run through a prioritization exercise, we'll do it. But a lot of people work in organizations

you do need to get stakeholders involvement and get team involvement. It starts, as you said, with the individual and then works through teams. And then really getting the executive alignment and getting traction is a core component, I think, of people having success in organizations. So appreciate you walking through that. On that note, I want to thank you again for your time, Harry. And I want to give you an opportunity to let people know where to find you. mean, obviously, like LinkedIn and the book, which they can find.

everywhere, you're also sounds like you're doing consulting services. So how can people find you? What are ways that, you know, you're looking to interact with, with your audience and maybe potential clients.

Harry Max (33:27.588)
Yeah, I appreciate that Mark. I'm very easy to find. I'm Harry Max everywhere. I'm Harry Max on LinkedIn. Harry Max. I mean, really, I've been around, I'm old, right? I used to have hair. I'm easy to find. HarryMax .com is kind of my personal book related site. I have a business called Peak Priorities. And so you can go there. LinkedIn is probably the easiest place. spend most of my time, my social time, spend there interacting with people.

And if you just want to send me a piece of email, it's harry at harrymax .com. That's the easiest thing to do.

Mark Baldino (34:01.489)
Fantastic. Well, I'm glad you're easy to find. I'm on LinkedIn as well. We'll include links to the book and your LinkedIn and peak priorities when we post the episode. But again, thank you very much for your time today. Appreciate your perspective and just want to remind everybody to go out and grab a copy of Managing Priorities, How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions. Thank you for your time, Harry.

Harry Max (34:23.79)
Thank you so much, Mark.