Bobby MoestaInnovator, Entrepreneur, Professor and Advisor

'Working Together' by Bob Moesta

18 Jan 2023 · 3 min

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2:38

In this talk, the speaker presents a straightforward prioritization technique he calls the "natural priority of the work." The method involves listing all tasks, grouping them into buckets, and then mapping the relationships between tasks as "ins" (dependencies) and "outs" (outputs). Tasks with many outs are prioritized first, while those with many ins are scheduled later. By iterating through the tasks and counting these connections, the speaker derives an optimal sequence that aligns with how tasks support each other, such as using empathetic perspective and causal structures to improve demand discovery before moving to prototyping. He argues this approach cuts development time dramatically compared to traditional matrix or weighting methods, citing personal experience and a related post by Ryan Singer that applied the same principle to build a product's core first.

Chapters

I'm going to leave you with one tool. I have a method to prioritize. And I talk about it as the natural priority of the work. It's a very simple process. I take all the things that I have to do and I, I I build them into buckets. So for example, this way, if I work on my empathetic perspective, does that help me with uncovering demand? Yeah, that will help me with it. If I actually work on empathetic perspective, will it help me with causal structures? It actually will too, because I can actually see it from different ways. And so you start to go around the, around the thing, and you start to see these things where you say sometimes it affects it, sometimes it doesn't, right? But here's the thing, when you're done, once you've gone all the way around, You count how many ins and outs. What's the impact of an out? Something that impacts something else. What's an out? It's what I should be doing first. And something that has a lot of ins, I probably should be doing last. And so it actually helps me build the priority and sequence of what I should go do. And so by having the ins and outs, I can actually go all the way around and kind of go like, oh, So if I want to work on this, you know what, first things I got to work on is empathetic, perceptive, and causal structures, because that'll help me be better at uncovering demand. And once I have those 2, it'll help me with prototyping to learn. And so then there's a natural priority. So what happens is, is 90% of the time teams are always saying like, we got to figure out how to prioritize. They build these matrix, they build these weighting factors, they do all these other things. I'm like, let's just do this. And this usually is the way in which I can actually cut development time in half for people because they usually do it in the wrong sequence because they'll say, oh, this is the most important one. We gotta work on this one because it's most important. And guess what? I'm actually working on this one all the way back up there, and it makes it 10 times easier if I do this one last. I use this tool every single day. It's the point, like, people have started finally writing about it, but Ryan Singer has a great post on this. That just, as we looked at a series of things we had to go build, we actually built the middle of the product first because of that process. Thank you.