Picking Priorities
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📓 Key Takeaways
📘 Don’t lock in your roadmap. Most people obsess over priorities like they're permanent. They're not.
📘 Treat priorities as flexible bets, not lifelong commitments. You pick based on what matters most right now - who you've got, what you want to do, what feels achievable. At 37Signals, six-week cycles make this easy. Every six weeks, pick something, work on it, ship it. Then move on. You don’t need a five-year plan when you can re-evaluate every month and a half.
📘 Building software isn’t like launching rockets or constructing skyscrapers. You don’t need to plan every step years ahead. Making product decisions close to execution leads to better choices. You know more the day before you start than nine months prior. That knowledge gap kills roadmaps.
📘 Shifting direction doesn't mean you're disorganised. It means you're tuned in. When someone left their team recently, 37Signals cut a product to stay focused. Everyone agreed. No panic. Just clarity. What causes chaos is flipping priorities too often, not adapting them.
📘 Shape Up’s six-week cycles strike the balance. Founders get room to chase fresh ideas - but only at the right time. Teams get uninterrupted time to execute. It prevents thrashing, protects focus and lets better ideas rise over time.
📘 Customers ask for 12-24 month plans. 37Signals says no. Every time they've promised delivery months out, they’ve regretted it. Because you can’t predict how a product or team will evolve. The only commitment that matters is the next cycle.
📘 Don’t plan to feel professional. Plan to build the right thing.
💬 Top Quotes
Priorities, well, I think the first thing is that they're not, they don't need to be permanent. They're sort of like, what do you think is important right now and you have to commit to that because you don't want to keep whiplashing people back and forth, right? So, you pick some things, what do you pick? You pick the best things you can based on who you have, what you want to do, what your thoughts are, what you think you can achieve
I think that deciding if you're going to build a new product or commit significant resources to something, that's a different kind of thing. And I think even those are relatively flexible for most kinds of businesses like ours. Obviously if you're Boeing or Airbus or SpaceX or one of these, that's a different story. But when you're making software, you don't need to run your business as if you are a business that has to invest in factories and parts and supply chain
And what we're going to do is just pick one of those things that we were doing instead of do two. We're going to do one. And then we're also going to put some other resources into something else and pause something and kind of shift some things around. And it feels right. Like you post that message internally and people, yeah, yeah, that makes sense
Jason's written about this frequently that when you make decisions far in advance of when you're actually going to do the work, you know nothing or at best, you know a little. You know much less than you would if you make that decision as close to the point of execution
Every single time Jason and I have promised two customers that we're going to deliver something X amount of time from now, we have regretted it with capital R. It is universally been just a bad idea to commit to a roadmap because we're committing with less information than if we're going to do it in time
So it's like, you can do this, you already do this. You can make it easier on yourself by not trying to guess the next year's worth of work. It's hard. And there's no reason to it. There's no reason to do that. There's no prize
That urgency is part of being a founder. And I think a very positive part of it. But you also need some restraint. You need some restraint where you go like, ooh, I really want to do this. But we're halfway through the cycle. And if I then yank people off something I told them three weeks ago, hey, they're not going to be very happy. B, it's not a very productive way to work
And what we find, of course, time and again, is that the idea you were super excited about that week, three weeks from now, maybe you're less excited or maybe not. Maybe that idea is still just like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I want to do this right now. You have the answer
