One of the hearts of our work is how teams work. So what better team dynamics to explore and understand than our own? (And only marginally less egotistical than analyzing yourself is analyzing the team you’re on; it includes others, so it’s not as extreme as just thinking about yourself.)
So let’s share and review today one of the various principles we use when we work internally, what we call on our team “ABR,” for “Always Be Reprioritizing.”
In short, our phrase is pretty clear and direct, not to mention a riff on a line from one of David Mamet’s (pronounced with the final -t at the end, of course) plays. You should always be reprioritizing; indeed, living your life according to what you thought your priorities were 25 years ago is likely a recipe for guaranteed disaster. And yet, shockingly, it’s incredible how often people—even smart, competent people—are given a set of priorities and then those become written in stone, embedded in their hearts, for seemingly forever.
It’s useful to think about this as though there are three levels of ABR: the worst strategy to avoid, the neutral, good-enough strategy, and then the best strategy. Let’s take them in order.
The worst strategy is to prioritize your work in an effectively random order. You’re a software developer, and you have 100 tickets to do, of which 22 are labeled Super Duper Urgent Top Priority Crisis. What do you sit down and do first? Even if you are savvy enough to realize that it may not be a terrible idea to start with the Super Duper Urgent Top Priority tickets, there are 22 of them. Which do you start with? The oldest? The most recent? The one you’re in the mood for?
Whatever you choose, it will effectively be random, and that’s dangerous. But this is what most software developers do, as well as most employees of all sorts: by remembering earlier priorities, using their memories of what they were told before, or just following whatever they think is best or whatever formula they use—it’s all essentially arbitrary.
This is bad because the arbitrarily chosen thing to do is very unlikely to be the key critical thing you need to do now.
This leads us to the second, distinctly better (but not yet great) strategy: ask your boss, client, or the key stakeholder. They will definitely have an opinion, and their opinion will likely be much better than yours—if only because of the tautology that they are your boss, client, or the key stakeholder! Who will have a better suggestion on what sort of food the chef should plan to put on the menu this week: the chef who happens to have a craving for some French pastries? Or the restaurant owner and operator who is spending all his days with the restaurant clients on the front lines, listening to them and what they’re requesting, not to mention having a sense of how much all the ingredients cost and the complexity and time delays of the different meals to cook? If you’re an artisan, then go with the former (and I love artisanal chefs that cook what they’re in the mood for)—but if you’re trying to keep a business or team alive, then I’d go for the second.
This strategy—asking your boss, client, or the key stakeholder—often isn’t done merely because team members feel shame in asking questions, especially these sorts of prioritization questions. But that’s just an emotional issue on your part, and you might want to think about how you can become comfortable with doing that. I have a lot of thoughts on how to do that—having gone through that myself—but that’s outside the scope of this little article.
But regardless: this strategy, of asking, is much better than the previous strategy of using “feels.”
The best strategy, however, is for you to have so much context, sophistication, and instinct about the project, what is happening, where it’s going, how it’s changing—that you HAVE YOUR HAND ON THE PULSE of the project so you will have a strong intuitive sense of what needs to be done. This is overwhelmingly the most valuable for the company—and for you, because if you can achieve that, then your company and your boss and teammates will love and appreciate you.
How do you have your hand on the pulse? Part of it is just having a lot of context from the different areas of the project—to be the anti-mushroom yourself. (Mushrooms, remember, are kept in the dark and feed on manure, although I use a less-nice, non-PG word for manure when I say this out loud.) Part of it is just smelling where the winds are going. Part of it is putting the time in to understand the real business goals and what the team is trying to achieve, particularly those of your boss, your client, and the key stakeholders—and their goals are often not even aligned with each other’s goals.
But most of all, it is just having a “sense” or a “sensibility” (hi, Jane!) for what’s happening around you. Here’s an easy way to help figure that out: just look at what subjects those above you are talking more about, for there’s usually a strong correlation between what they’re talking about and what they’re prioritizing. Of course, sometimes, the biggest things they don’t, they can’t, talk about—and this is part of what makes the game fun and not so obvious.
If you can achieve this almost mind-reading state—that’s when your magic can really unlock itself. You can then figure out what needs to be done before even your boss or client do. And that’s when magical ideas start transforming into magical reality.
