One list to rule them all

A simple list can make all of the hard decisions happen.

This month, we’re going to explore one of the most powerful forcing functions available to leaders: the single prioritized list.

It’s probably the most simple idea you could think of: that your team, department, or company should have one list of priorities, stack ranked from top to bottom, but it’s surprisingly rare to see in practice because it’s so hard to do.

Most organizations instead operate with multiple competing roadmaps, parallel backlogs, and a collection of P0 initiatives that all demand equal attention. The result is predictable: silos, politics, and a workforce that’s perpetually busy but rarely finishing anything.

We’re picking up a theme that has threaded through recent months. If you’d like to dig deeper, here are the previous articles from the archive:

• One bottleneck at a time explores the Theory of Constraints and how systems always have a single constraint that limits throughput.

• The beauty of constraints reframes constraints as tools that unlock unconventional thinking and force ruthless prioritization.

• Being in the details covers how leaders can stay close to what their teams are building.

All of these articles revolve around a common idea: the discipline of focus and how saying no, and doing less, is one of the most important skills that you should learn as a leader. This month, we expand upon that by exploring what happens when leaders sidestep the hard work of deciding what truly comes first.

Priority, not priorities

Last year, a friend recommended a book to me called Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. Within it was an anecdote about priorities which I found compelling.

The word “priority” came into the English language in the 1400s, and it was singular, meaning the very first thing, the thing that came before all others. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years.

Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about “priorities.” The Oxford English Dictionary charts this shift in usage over time. As society moved into the industrial era, the singular priority gave way to multiple priorities, and the organisational behaviours that followed may have mirrored the overloading of the word itself.

Think about your own organisation for a moment.

• How many parallel roadmaps and subroadmaps exist, with engineers smeared fractionally across all of them? For example, does your security roadmap fight with your product roadmap and your performance roadmap?

• How many teams have their own backlog of P0 items, with each saying they need more people to work on them?

• How many initiatives are all happening at once, each with their own sponsor claiming that theirs is the most important, leading to silos and politics?

Here’s the rub: the plural form of the word has given us permission to avoid the hard work of truly deciding what comes first.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Because a single ordered list forces you to tell someone that their work isn’t as important as they thought. It means having uncomfortable conversations about why one team’s initiative sits below another, and it risks making enemies, or at least uncomfortable allies.

But it’s not just about other people: multiple priorities also let us avoid making hard choices ourselves, because as long as everything is important, we never have to confront what we’re willing to sacrifice. Hell, we even do it within our own personal to-do lists. So instead, we create parallel tracks, we give each team their own roadmap, we let every team maintain their own P0 list, and we avoid the conflict by pretending that everything can be first.

A single prioritised list is a forcing function, and it’s equally powerful at the individual, team, department, and organisational level. In fact, it gets more important the broader the impact. It forces the hard conversations to happen, because you cannot place two items in the same position, and someone has to decide which one comes first.

It requires trade-offs to be explicit, because moving something up means moving something else down, and everyone can see the consequences. It also drives alignment, because once the list exists, there is no ambiguity about what the organisation considers most important. And it externalises the debate: the argument becomes about the list, not about individuals and their opinions, which makes prioritisation a rational exercise rather than an emotional one.

So does it actually work? Let’s look at some examples.

Making the hard choice

There are plenty of high profile examples of the single list method working in practice. Let’s look at three of them.

At PayPal, Peter Thiel insisted that every single person could only do exactly one thing. According to Keith Rabois, Thiel would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your number one initiative. Annual reviews reinforced this: employees could only identify their single most valuable contribution to the company.

Thiel understood that most people will solve problems that they understand how to solve, which means, in his words, that they will solve B+ problems instead of A+ problems. A+ problems are high impact, but they’re difficult, and you cannot immediately derive a solution, so you tend to procrastinate. The discipline of only being allowed to do one thing led to significant breakthroughs.

Amazon embodies this principle through what they call single-threaded leadership. David Limp, a former SVP, said: “The best way to ensure that you failed to invent something is by making it somebody’s part-time job.” A single-threaded leader is entirely dedicated to one initiative, with no competing responsibilities: they solely work on the number one item on their list.

When Jeff Bezos wanted to build the Kindle, he appointed Steve Kessel to lead it. As described in Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Kessel was running the physical books, music, and video business at the time, which was 77% of Amazon’s revenue. The crucial decision was that Kessel left his previous role entirely: he didn’t try to run both. The same pattern repeated with AWS, where Andy Jassy was the single-threaded owner from inception. Both, as you well know, became successful businesses.

And then, in the most famous example, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company had dozens of mediocre products and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Jobs eliminated 70% of them and focused on just four computers: a consumer desktop (iMac), a consumer laptop (iBook), a professional desktop (Power Macintosh G3), and a professional laptop (PowerBook G3). “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on,” he said. “But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”

Years later, Jobs gave advice to Nike CEO Mark Parker that captures the same philosophy: “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”

These examples share a common thread: leaders who were willing to make the hard choice and live with the consequences. But what happens when they don’t?

Death by a thousand priorities

What happens when organisations don’t make the hard choice? The symptoms are predictable, and you’ve probably seen them before.

• Silos form. When teams don’t share a single list, they stop sharing ownership. Each team optimises for their own backlog, guards their own resources, and operates from a mindset of scarcity. An American Management Association survey found that 83% of executives said silos existed in their companies, and 97% said they have a negative effect, yet it still continues to happen.

• Engineers get peanut buttered. Without clear priorities, engineering managers spread people thinly across too many projects. Everyone is partially allocated to everything, and nothing gets the focused attention it needs. A common failure mode is when everything becomes a P0, and any project owner who honestly labels something as P1 learns quickly that there’s no time for P1 work.

• Decision fatigue sets in. When there’s no single list to reference, every resource allocation becomes a negotiation. Leaders burn cognitive energy on debates that a clear ranking would have settled automatically.

Think back over the last week. How many of these effects have you seen, individually or perhaps all of them? How often does this happen at your organisation?

Your turn

Creating a single prioritised list is simple in theory and difficult in practice. But the difficulty is the point: the discomfort you feel when forcing a ranking is the same discomfort you’ve been avoiding by letting everything be equally important.

Take ten minutes and try this exercise:

• List everything. Write down every project and initiative currently in flight for your team or department. Don’t filter or categorise yet, just get them all down.

• Force a ranking. Put them in order from one to n. Not tiers, not categories: a single ordered list. No ties allowed.

• Notice the hesitation. Where do you want to create exceptions? Where does it feel impossible to choose? That hesitation is where the real prioritisation work lives.

• Identify who decides. Can you make these choices on your own, or do you need input from your team and peers? If it’s the latter, that conversation is the one you’ve been avoiding.

If you lead a department, see if you can identify the most important priority for each team, then rank that list. Don’t worry about the detail within each team for now. Are any teams under or overstaffed, and is that because the hard decision hasn’t been made? Would it be easier to have that rebalancing conversation with the list as proof?

Then share your list with your peers, your team, or your manager for input. Talk about the content of this article and see whether the single list approach could unblock some of the gnarliest decision bottlenecks you’re facing right now.

Wrapping up

Remember, it’s priority, not priorities: you should just have one single list. The principle is simple, but the execution requires courage: the courage to tell someone their project is seventh, the courage to admit you’ve been avoiding the hard choice yourself, and the courage to make trade-offs visible rather than hiding them behind parallel tracks and consensus theatre.

The companies that move fastest aren’t the ones with the most resources: they’re the ones that know what comes first.

Until next time.