How to Achieve Ruthless Prioritization

One of the most essential aspects of agile working is ruthless prioritization. By focusing on the few things that matter most to the customers and the business, an organization can maximize its benefits and minimize its costs. In the book of “The Agile Leader,” three ways are introduced to achieve a level of ruthless prioritization that will help leaders to establish greater agility in their organizations:

1. Be the product owner: be clear, involve others, let go and give people space to make it happen.

The role of Product Owner in Scrum has three main responsibilities: provide a vision of what is to be built; understand the customers to anticipate their needs; and manage the product backlog by proper prioritization. Similarly, when an agile leader has a clear vision and is really in tune with the customers, he can provide the prioritization that enables others to act quickly, effectively and collaboratively, just as a product owner does in his Scrum team.

To be the product owner, the leader needs to empower people closer to the customers to make prioritization decisions while consistently communicating the organization’s vision in a crystal clear way, so that local team’s priorities and actions are serving higher-level priorities of the organization, and that priorities at all levels are well aligned with the overall vision…