Brad Feld

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Fierce Prioritization

Sep 24, 2019
Category Management

I heard this phrase at a board meeting today from another board member.

Fierce prioritization

What are the 30% of your activities that you should spend 100% of your time on?

You’ve got 30 people in your company. You have nine months of cash in the bank. You are making progress. But it’s not clear if you are making enough progress fast enough to raise money from new investors before you run out of money.

Of course, the word “progress” is completely open for interpretation, subjective, and varies dramatically by company.

What do you do? A natural reaction is to cut costs to extend your runway to give you more time to make progress, whatever progress means.

At 30 people, that’s probably the wrong answer. It might not be, but I like the answer of “fierce prioritization” a lot better.

Focus your 30 people on the 30% of things that will really matter. Stop doing the 70% that don’t matter. Right now. Don’t wait.

Fierce prioritization applies to many things in life, not just business. Fiercely prioritize fierce prioritization.

I love the phrase.