This is the antidote to the estimates and prioritization problem, and it might be the most valuable thing you can do for the least amount of effort.
Every team around your product has requests — or demands, depending on the culture. This is a gift. Customer-facing teams especially are sitting on gold mines of feedback, and you should treat them that way. The problem is that nobody has time to read, rank, and understand hundreds of requests, and if the development team tries to prioritize alone, they waste time and miss everyone else's insight.
The move: ask them to rank it
For every team with a wishlist, do this:
- Tell them you love the wishlist. Keep adding to it.
- Ask them to put it in strict rank order. No ties. You trust their judgment.
- Ask them to rank by pain severity and number of users affected — not recency or gut.
- Book an hour to walk through their top five, so you understand them deeply.
That's it. You're acknowledging that you can't do everything, and you're honoring them by trusting their opinion. You've also quietly forced them to reckon with real tradeoffs instead of lobbing requests over the wall.
What happens
- Some top-ranked items turn out to be simple text changes. Fix them on the spot.
- Yesterday's loud nit drops way down the list the moment they have to rank it against everything else — and they're not annoyed, because it was their call.
- When something on their list is a huge project that won't happen this year, they take it well and replace it. Now they're doing product strategy.
- Sometimes an item shows up on three different teams' top fives. You didn't realize it was that important. Now you do.
Bring other teams into the prioritization conversation. Run your meetings around top fives. Stop teasing out hundreds of old tickets that might not even matter.