Before you sort the list of ideas, put an objective above it. Otherwise you are tidying tasks, not choosing actions

Prioritisation is not sorting a task list. It is something you always do against a specific objective, and that is the one condition teams skip, even though they know the sorting methods by heart. In the episode we work on the example of a company that narrowed itself down from the global education market to 5 universities in a single state, and that narrowing is what makes the whole exercise meaningful. We are no longer working out how to become a world leader, only how to win over a few specific universities. Above the list hangs a quarterly objective with three key results: 10 signed contracts, 30 per cent of the target group using the quiz feature, and 80 lecturers declaring that they want to keep working with the tool after the trial phase. We assess every idea against these, not against how it sounds.

The matrix itself has two axes: impact on the objective and effort. The effort scale has to be agreed before the assessment, otherwise the estimates can't be compared; in the example small effort is a few days, large effort is months or the whole quarter. The assessment is relative, it is not an estimate, the point is to compare tasks with one another. A LinkedIn campaign aimed at professors lands high with little effort, because the first replies can come within a week or two, and preparing the persona and the list of professors for prospecting go back to it as subtasks instead of competing with it on the matrix. An event with a stand at a university goes the other way: you have to fly there, bring materials and be on site, and the link to the key results isn't directly visible. 30 face-to-face meetings with professors mean at least 2 weeks on site, so the effort is large, but so is the impact, because conversations like these show how these people work. What came out highest was learning how professors really run their lectures and quizzes: moderate effort, and a negative result immediately hits the strategic assumption.

Three items on the list found no place anywhere: a report on the productivity of remote work, an ebook on remote meetings and an interview on a big podcast. They all sound sensible and none of them can be linked to a key result, so we park them instead of pushing them into the quarter. We don't make the decision for the person who came up with the idea: we ask what impact on these results they see, what effect they expect and when. Usually, after these questions, they say themselves that it isn't the best candidate. It is worth saying plainly that this method doesn't answer every question. In our own work on getting new leads we sort hypotheses by completely different criteria: how quickly they can bring in a client, how big the project will be and how much we want that client. You pick the criteria to fit the question you are answering at the time.