Prioritize tasks fast

Teams accumulate thousands of product ideas and customer feature requests. Deciding where to focus is the challenge. This guide shows how to establish a fast, structured prioritization process based on proven experience.

Why meetings and frameworks alone don't work

Discussing all tasks during online sync-ups proved inefficient. Going through 100 issues requires hours, and teams lose focus after the first hour. Only 20% of planned issues get reviewed. Communication becomes the biggest bottleneck.

"Communication is the biggest challenge. It is difficult to know what each team and person is prioritizing and how they like to work." Hiten Shah

Prioritization frameworks help structure evaluation. Team members assign scores asynchronously based on criteria. Starting with Google Sheets allowed discussing only high-scoring tasks.

Frameworks like RICE, REAN, and KANO ease prioritization but don't solve everything. You still need processes for providing full issue context and collecting opinions efficiently.

Frameworks are the first step. You need a well-established process to make them work.

5 steps to fast task prioritization

This guide distills lessons learned into a step-by-step process. You can establish this prioritization approach in about one week.

Step 1: Write proper issue descriptions

Understanding a task requires a clear description. Follow problem statement guidelines:

Clear and brief Anyone on the team should understand the problem without context. Be accurate but concise—don't waste time on lengthy explanations.

Specific and supported Add screenshots, docs, links, or supporting materials. Don't make people guess or search for data.

Readable Use paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists, and font styles. Highlight essential details to improve readability.

Reasonable Divide large tasks into subtasks for intermediate checkpoints. Don't fit everything into one task.

Problem statement template

Problem

Describe the problem in sufficient detail. The better you describe it, the more likely teammates will offer alternative solutions.

Result

Describe the desired outcome and expected results.

Solution or comments (optional)

Add your ideas on solving the problem or relevant comments from customers or teammates.

An example of a clearly stated issue.

Step 2: Define clear evaluation criteria

You can use a prioritization framework, but no single framework works for all teams. Combine criteria from several frameworks and customize them for your team and product.

Example combination:

North Star Metric + RICE + AARRR + Business Pain Point

• Sales — Influences revenue income (Acquisition from AARRR)
• Activation — Helps users understand how the product works (Activation from AARRR)
• Retention — Increases motivation to use the product again (Retention from AARRR)
• Service — Reduces customer support time without quality loss (Business Pain Point)
• FB Ads — Increases Facebook Ads launched via the product (Product North Star Metric)
• Time — Development time required (Effort from RICE)
• Mass — Number of customers affected (Reach from RICE)

Evaluate each criterion on a scale from 0 to 3. Some teams use the Fibonacci Sequence, but a simple scale works well without adding complexity.

Step 3: Choose prioritization tools

Tools provide three key benefits:

Fast Asynchronous evaluation in tools or spreadsheets is faster than discussing everything on calls.

Flexible Not all criteria have equal value. Development Time has negative impact, while Retention might be more significant than Sales. Tools let you adjust criteria weights quickly.

Automated Time is a core resource. Spend it on prioritization, but much less than on implementing tasks. Tools automate the process and save time for actual work.

How to automate prioritization

Spreadsheets

Google Sheets, Notion, AirFocus, and Coda work well when you can set up calculation formulas.

Starting with Google Sheets meant uploading issues from Jira and evaluating them there. Prioritization got faster initially but stopped working after a few weeks. Formulas crashed, spreadsheets froze, and tasks got lost or duplicated. The team had to open dozens of tabs to read issues in Jira and often forgot about evaluation.

Spreadsheets work but require an admin. Expect to spend about 15 hours a month fixing them.

Dedicated tools

Prioritization tools offer another approach. After the Google Sheets experience, tools like Ducalis emerged. The UI resembles spreadsheets but includes full issue context and runs faster.

Ducalis allows tweaking criteria without losing scores or breaking calculation formulas. It also highlights score disagreements to show team alignment.

Step 4: Collect diverse opinions

Different teams can evaluate tasks together: product managers, developers, designers, and sales managers. Each has unique context and expertise. This makes evaluation less subjective and more professional.

Sales managers understand impact on sales, developers know development complexity, and marketers see promotion usefulness.

Divide criteria among different teams. Joint evaluation synchronizes teams, aligns them around goals, and provides a bird's-eye view of each issue.

Step 5: Make prioritization a weekly habit

Prioritization must be regular. New tasks and ideas appear every week or day. Some may be more relevant to business goals than already-planned work. Re-evaluate issues consistently to ensure priorities stay aligned.

Friday is evaluation day—the team asynchronously grooms the backlog and plans the future sprint. Weekly reminders in Slack help sustain the habit.

Summary

No one wants to spend hours evaluating and discussing tasks, even knowing how important it is. Prioritization should be fast, smooth, and structured. The steps above help achieve that. Moving from long calls to an automated process reduced time to about 20 minutes on prioritization and another 0.5% of team time on discussions every week.

Implement this guide and save your team hundreds of hours for real work.