Step 3 - Start Making Prioritization Decisions
This is where the Plan of Record becomes real
Once you have visibility into all the work and at least preliminary estimates of team capacity, you’re ready to start making prioritization decisions. The output of this step is the actual Plan of Record (PoR), which will serve as a “persistent but not permanent” prioritization of resources in order to achieve your corporate goals.
Where to Begin
If you’re new to your leadership role, your long-term goal is to align prioritization decisions with corporate goals through cascading objectives and key results (OKRs) that reach every team. But early on, the reality is likely to be very different.
Start by understanding how prioritization is happening today — what’s being prioritized, by whom, and why. Then use the PoR process to chart a path from that starting point to where you want to go.
In the worst cases, you may find that everything is considered a priority — perhaps even explicitly stated by the CEO. This typically means the team is in best efforts mode, reacting to the latest crisis or perceived urgency, rather than making deliberate choices about trade-offs.
Even in less chaotic environments, it’s almost inevitable that the team’s capacity is insufficient to deliver all the visible work within the existing roadmap timeline.
So, the first step is to make the existing prioritization explicit in the PoR. From there, you can evaluate what’s consuming capacity and decide what the team can realistically commit to.
The Two Categories to Look For
When you examine what’s already being prioritized, you’ll usually find two categories:
1. Real or Perceived “Must Do’s”
Without a visible PoR, teams often prioritize work they think is non-negotiable: fixing platform outages, addressing severe bugs, or resolving escalations from large customers.
Sometimes they’re right. Other times, these priorities may reflect assumptions — not deliberate decisions.
This is where the PoR process creates clarity. You can validate which “must do’s” align with corporate goals and commit to those. The rest can be explicitly deprioritized or moved to a later time horizon.
2. Promises Made to Customers or Prospects
If you’re in a sales-driven culture, it’s likely that commitments have been made — with or without your team’s input. These promises may be driving work that hasn’t been vetted for alignment with goals, technical feasibility, or timeline.
Again, your PoR gives you the ability to triage: Which promises support your goals? Which can be renegotiated or pushed out? Which need to be walked back?
Expect the “Oh Sh*t” Moment
When you total up the work already underway — outages, bugs, support escalations, perceived “must do’s,” and promises made — you may discover that there’s little or no capacity left for strategic roadmap items.
This is your “oh sh*t” moment.
Use it as an opportunity to bring the executive team into the prioritization process. The ability to have an open, trust-based conversation about trade-offs is the signal that your PoR process is working.
If that conversation isn’t possible yet, that’s a sign you need to invest in building trust (see “Prerequisite 1 – Trust-Based Culture”).
Use the Time Dimension
To prioritize effectively, you need to manage when work gets done — not just whether it gets done.
Many companies struggle to create forward visibility. Often, their roadmaps stop at the fiscal year boundary, and visibility decreases the closer you get to year-end.
The PoR solves this. Because it’s a living process, you can create a rolling, forward-looking roadmap.
Start small:
Use quarters as your unit of time.
Build a PoR for the next two quarters, with the highest confidence in near-term delivery dates.
Then extend to four quarters, with solid estimates further out.
As you mature the process, your roadmap becomes both more credible and more transparent — internally and externally.
Up next – With work prioritized and timelines set, the final piece is communication — building trust by explaining what’s being done, why, and how it may change.