Today, I want to talk about something that's been present in pretty much every team I’ve coached in the past where everything is urgent or most of the backlog items are absolutely necessary. It's also at this moment we realize the product backlog has become a fighting ground for the HiPPOs (highest paid person's opinions).
The 127 items problem
A few years ago, I was working at a local telco startup as their Agile coach in their main product line. On a quick analysis of their backlog, it struck to me they had 127 items marked as "high priority.". Further conversations with the team quickly paint me the rest of the story, the product owner looked exhausted. the developers complaining about always jumping between tasks. And the stakeholders and sponsors? All frustrated because their requests kept getting delayed.
During the first sprint planning session I observed, I noticed the team trying to fit 40 story points worth of "critical" work into a 20-point capacity sprint. The conversation went in circles for hours. None of the stakeholders present wanted to be the one to say their item wasn't actually that important.
The Product Owner being a mere executor and not empowered to prioritize is another problem on its own which deserves to be tackled on another episode. So, let me focus on the actual problem I was trying to solve first: the prioritization (or lack of it).
At a High Level What Actually Happened
Here's what we did, step by step:
The Priority Audit We listed every "urgent" item and asked three questions:
What happens if we don't do this in the next 4 weeks?
Who specifically is impacted?
What's the actual cost of delay?
Those were great conversations starters which allowed us to dig deeper on the “why” each item was important. It was noticeable in the conversations that the actual important items were usually fairly easy to spot and didn’t need much debate whereas the least important ones or the ones with unclear requirements had much more conversations and sometimes offline discussions were arranged to clarify them.
At the end the week of the “audit”, out of 127 items, only 23 had clear, immediate consequences to the business. The rest were simply not urgent.
The Stakeholder Check We brought all the key stakeholders and sponsors into one room and showed them the facts: the team could deliver an average of about 20 story points per sprint and explained that in the past they were always trying to fit at least double of that in their sprints. A few “ooohs” of surprise later, we asked them to collectively decide what would made the cut for the next three sprints in order of priority.
The meeting was very uncomfortable. People had to defend their requests in front of each other and it was very clear when items were not important and they were just randomly throwing buzzwords and filler words. But something really interesting happened: they started negotiating among themselves. For example, the marketing department realized their dashboard update could wait to allow for compliance and legal to get their regulatory fixes first.
The New Rules Simply established a few rules:
Only 3 items could be marked "urgent" for every sprint
New urgent items required removing an existing one
Every request needed a business justification with clear outline of business impacts, not just "the boss wants it"
The Result?
A few months later, the team's velocity had actually increased by a sizeable amount. Not because they were working harder, but because they stopped context-switching. They finished what they started. Quality also improved because they now had time to do things right.
The (majority of) stakeholders adapted as well. They learned to think strategically about timing. Instead of everything being a fire drill, they started planning ahead and we even introduce prioritization scorecards later on.
Learnings
Priority inflation is real. When there's no cost to say something is "urgent," everything becomes urgent. Creating some degree of artificial scarcity forces real prioritization.
Transparency changes behavior. When stakeholders can see what they are asking the team to drop, they make different choices.
Saying "not now" isn't saying "never." The team delivered more value by doing fewer things well, rather than many things poorly.
This experience reinforced why Agile practices like backlog refinement and sprint planning exist. They're not just there to be followed because they are in the book, they are drivers for the hard conversations about trade-offs and value.
My advice
If your team is drowning in "urgent" requests:
Count your priorities. If you have more than 5 "urgent" items, you have 0 urgent items.
Make trade-offs visible. Show stakeholders what stops when something new needs to start.
Create priority rules. Establish criteria for what makes something truly urgent.
Time-box the conversation. Don't let priority discussions drag on forever.
Review regularly. Priorities change and it’s okay.
What's your experience with prioritization? I'd love to hear your battle stories 🙂
