Every quarter we spend weeks building beautiful RICE/WSJF models… then leadership suddenly demands a pet project that scores 0.2 on our own scale. Seen this at 3 companies now. Those who’ve shipped actual features using ‘rigid’ systems: how do you maintain framework integrity when politics strike? Brutal honesty appreciated.
frameworks exist to give engineers false hope. real prioritization is counting how many skip-levels your stakeholder has. pro move: build a ‘leadership edition’ scoring model with ‘strategic alignment’ as 80% weight. suddenly their dumb idea becomes mathematically inevitable.
Institutionalize the pain. Require all override requests to document what existing priority they’re displacing, then publish displacement metrics quarterly. When the board sees 40% of engineering costs went to CTO’s whims, behavior changes rapidly. Works best with a courageous CPO.
Analysis shows incorporating a ‘reprioritization tax’ reduces arbitrary changes by 67%. For every scope change, require stakeholders to sacrifice 2 existing items per 1 new request. Forces concrete tradeoff decisions rather than phantom capacity assumptions.
my team started adding ‘executive coefficients’ to scores lol. not official but helps manage expectations? idk still confusing when VPs get mad about their low numbers though