One of the hardest parts of leading teams isn’t coming up with ideas. It’s deciding which ideas deserve our focus.

I’ve lived this firsthand in different seasons of my career. At Pearl Health, where we’ve been rapidly scaling in a new category, there have been times when dozens of good ideas were in motion at once — everything from national marketing campaigns, to grassroots physician engagement, to building new enterprise product features. Earlier in my career, at Catalant, I saw similar dynamics as we engaged Fortune 500 executives with access to independent consultants via a talent marketplace while also building a B2B SaaS platform to manage strategy execution.

Each initiative had passionate champions, compelling anecdotes, and the kind of urgency that made everything feel existential. In a world where everything feels important, the real work is figuring out how important something is relative to all the other important things.

That’s where structured prioritization frameworks come in.

Start with value criteria.

Too often, prioritization conversations start with the projects themselves: “Should we run campaign X or build feature Y?” Inevitably, those conversations spiral into unanchored debates, often resolved by whoever speaks the loudest or has the highest title in the room.

Instead, I’ve found it essential to first step back and ask: What are the value criteria we care about most right now?

In practice, this means forcing stakeholders to debate the relative weight of different drivers of value. Is speed-to-market more important than long-term scalability? Do we care more about near-term revenue impact or unlocking strategic partnerships? How much does customer delight weigh against internal operational efficiency?

This upfront conversation has rarely been an easy discussion in any organization I've served. But it's the right difficulty, surfacing alignment (or misalignment) on the fundamentals. Forcing the discussion at the value criteria level forces trade-offs explicitly — and, importantly, making a shared choice about what value criteria we're optimizing for at that moment, understanding these weights may change over time.

Starting with value criteria ensures that when we eventually compare projects, we’re doing so against a clear and agreed-upon definition of value. The act of debating what matters most, not just what we’re doing next, is where alignment begins.

Score work against what matters.

Once the team has debated and weighted value criteria, the next step is scoring each initiative, workstream, or project against them.

The beauty of this step is that it dimensions what’s otherwise fuzzy. Suddenly, we’re not just saying “this feels important” — we’re articulating why it’s important, and how it drives specific forms of value.

This exercise often creates clarity in surprising ways. Projects that seemed untouchable sometimes reveal themselves as low-scoring when judged against the team’s own value criteria. Conversely, initiatives that had been quietly sitting in the backlog can suddenly jump to the top when their true impact is quantified.

For example, during one planning cycle at Pearl, we were weighing whether to invest more heavily in national physician-facing brand campaigns or double down on equipping our sales teams with tools to accelerate conversion in-market. When we scored each project against agreed-upon criteria — revenue impact, scalability, physician delight, and operational efficiency — the sales enablement investments surfaced as the higher priority. That didn’t mean brand campaigns were unimportant, but it gave us clarity that the single biggest lever in that season was improving velocity in the growth funnel.

Go from loud to structured debate.

By turning a qualitative conversation into a semi-quantitative structure, you shift the dynamic. Decisions stop being about rhetoric or politics and start being about trade-offs grounded in shared definitions of value.

This doesn’t mean the framework makes decisions automatic. There’s still art in interpreting results, challenging assumptions, and considering strategic context. But the framework creates a level playing field. It gives teams a common language and reduces the risk of wasting energy on circular arguments.

Dynamically cascade reprioritization.

Perhaps the most valuable part of this system is how easily it adapts as conditions change. Strategy isn’t static. Markets shift. Competitors move. Customer needs evolve.

When the definition of what’s important changes, this framework lets you cascade that shift quickly. If “long-term scalability” suddenly becomes less important than “speed-to-market,” you don’t have to rebuild your prioritization from scratch. You simply update the weights of your value criteria, and the scores automatically reflect the new reality.

That agility is what makes the system powerful: when what’s important changes, priorities shift naturally and transparently. That agility is essential in any business function. The goal isn’t to pick a perfect roadmap once, but to continuously adapt priorities to maximize impact in a changing environment.

With a prioritization framework, reprioritization avoids chaos when conditions change. It provides a structured recalibration that cascades clearly across every team’s plan.

Look back to the physics of growth.

In earlier posts, I’ve written about the physics of growth — the interplay of volume, velocity, and conversion. Prioritization is the bridge that connects those forces to action.

Because while there are always hundreds of right things we could do, we can’t do them all at once. Prioritization helps us decide which initiatives will meaningfully increase volume, which will accelerate velocity, and which will improve conversion. And just as importantly, it helps us explain to our teams why certain paths matter more than others in this season.

We’re not trying to boil the ocean. We’re trying to pick the right buckets of water to heat up first. Or to return to elephant imagery, as my mother often said when I faced a daunting challenge: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." 

Navigate the ocean of possibilities.

Prioritization is less about finding the “right” answer and more about creating the conditions for better decisions. By anchoring in value criteria, scoring projects against them, and making trade-offs explicit, we turn what’s often a chaotic or political process into one that’s structured, transparent, and adaptable.

And in my experience leading different types of initiatives across Growth, Marketing, and Product, that structure isn’t just helpful — it’s the only way to keep moving forward when the ocean of possibilities feels overwhelming.