BDTP. Managing Priorities with Harry Max
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Hello everyone and welcome to Better Done Than Perfect podcast for SaaS marketers and product people. Our awesome guest today is Harry Max, author of Managing Priorities, also a speaker, coach and consultant. And we're going to talk about managing priorities today. This show is brought to you by Uselist, an email automation platform for SaaS companies. On board, engage and nurture your customers as well as marketing leads.

To follow the best practices, download our free printable email planning worksheets at useless.com slash worksheets. Hi, Harry. It's really great to be here. Thank you for bringing me onto your show. Looking forward to the conversation.

Excited to have you today and have such a unique veteran style view of things. And we'd love to dive into your background story first, because your background story goes way to the back, if I can say so. Yeah.

Well, at this point in my career, I consider myself an executive player coach. And that means I'm a fractional executive and I do executive coaching from within those fractional executive roles. I also do speaking, consulting, training, and so on and so forth. Prior to this, I was an executive at multiple companies, typically in product design, product development. Companies like Rackspace have been involved in multiple startups, notably Virtual Vineyards, which became Wine.com.

where I designed and launched the first online secure shopping cart back in 1995, January, to give you a sense of time. And I've had the incredible pleasure of working at some amazing companies from Skype to DreamWorks to Apple to Hewlett Packard. I'm largely a Silicon Valley guy, although I have had the opportunity to work in Europe and across the United States as well.

But I'm looking forward to the conversation today. I get to bring a broad range of experience, not just design, not just product, but general consulting, general executive work. Yeah. Congrats on your recent book. And there's a lot of synchronicity between your book, the way you're doing it and the show name here, because your book about managing priorities is not even done, but already published.

And all in all, please tell us how you ended up focusing on this subject for your research and the book project and how the project has been unfolding. Yeah, it's a funny story. Back in 2015, I was giving talks on diagnostic thinking and problem framing, creative problem solving, as it were. South by Southwest, I did a TEDx talk on it. I spoke at a number of companies, USAA, Adobe, and so on and so forth.

What was interesting was during those talks, I didn't get a lot of engagement. At the end of the talk, I touched on the topic of prioritization and all the hands went up in the room to ask questions about prioritization. And I thought that this is very strange, but as a product person, you're always looking for demand signal. Where is there an unmet or underserved need? And I thought,

The signal of people asking questions about prioritization told me that there was perhaps a gap in the information that was available to the world.

So I called a friend of mine who happened to be a publisher and presented the problem to him. And both of us were surprised after doing a little bit of research that there are literally hundreds of books and blogs and websites and videos that talk about how important prioritization is. But there were no books that talked about how to do it in an organization with teams and individuals.

So I embarked on writing that book. It turned out to be much more challenging, much, much more challenging and much longer process than I ever expected. But alas, in May, I shipped it. Better done than correct. The last chapter is still in development, so that won't make it until the next edition of the book is available. But yeah, it's a critical topic.

Apart from people generally admitting that this is an important topic, which is great, what are real business reasons for managing priorities well? What are the risks of not doing so in your organization? Yeah, you know, it's interesting in that the evidence of not prioritizing well, either as an organization, as a team, or an individual,

is all over the place, right? I characterize it as losing control of the timeline. And what I mean by that is the invisible thread that connects the past to the present to the future. I call that the timeline. And when you lose control of the timeline, what happens is you end up having to react to events as they're occurring, rather than to respond to them in a more intentional and more outcome-oriented way. And we see this all over the place. We see it

different countries, we see it in different sectors, we see it in different organizations, we see it in different teams, we see it in our own lives. At the point that you really don't have many options and you feel compelled to have to just react just to deal with what's going on in front of you, you've lost control of the timeline. And prioritization is

is the process of giving you more perceived control over that and giving you better options so that you can make better plans and better decisions. Your challenging book journey led you to a discovery that prioritization itself

has much more to it than just the prioritization phase. So can you share with us what you discovered and how your vision of the topic has evolved from when you started the book towards right now? Sure. Well, maybe beginning with the last part of your question first, the journey of the book started with the self-deception

the hallucination, if you will, that I could write a book on the topic of prioritization. How hard could it be? I've written books before and it turned out it was much harder than I ever expected. And in fact, the first version of the book and the first publisher that I worked with, we ended up having to cancel the project and set it aside until I had a better understanding of the topic and how I was going to approach it from a pedagogical point of view, a teaching point of view.

I think that there were a couple of key insights. I'll say the largest one, and I spend a good portion of the book focusing on this, is that prioritization, the process of prioritizing is not a single event.

I liken it to skiing or to animating. I worked at DreamWorks Animation, and that was the studio that did Shrek and Shrek 2. And I had the great opportunity to work on the movie Shrek 2 with an incredible range of creative and intelligent technical people. And what I learned at DreamWorks was that animation isn't one thing. Animation is a dozen things.

different phases of the process. And any one of them, any one of those phases, if you skip it, it's going to come back and bite you later and things aren't going to turn out as well as you want. And when I looked at prioritization, the process of prioritizing items, which are potential priorities because they're not priorities until they've been prioritized. When I looked at that process of prioritization, I realized that there were five things

general steps to it in all circumstances, regardless of language, regardless of industry, regardless of sector. And that is the centerpiece of the book. It is this DGAP process. DGAP is an acronym for D-E-G-A-P.

In English, D is for decide if the benefits of spending the time to prioritize intentionally are going to outweigh the cost of not just acting quickly, engaging in the process by identifying stakeholders, figuring out how you're going to collect the information that you need, gathering that information, arranging that information, and then prioritizing it.

So those five stages, D-E-G-A-P, are the process of prioritizing. I won't go into how animation works. I'm not going to talk to you about skiing. All I'll tell you is if you climb up to the top of a mountain and you strap a set of skis on and you're not well prepared and you lean forward on a black diamond run, things aren't likely to go well. And the same is true for prioritization.

You're not the first person in the world to develop a framework for prioritizing. So as part of your research project, you also recap the other existing frameworks that you could find. Could you give us a brief overview of available popular methods in the market right now and how you managed to figure out the good compromise between all of them? Or was it revolutionary different? Like, how do they all relate?

Yeah, great question. One of the other main insights in the book is that the DGAP process methodology is not actually a framework. It's a process method. And there are no other process methods for prioritizing. There is only one. And I've called it DGAP. But if you look at prioritization through any lens, it follows these same steps in the same order.

However, the other piece of it is now what is the taxonomy of methods that exist to hold prioritization together, which is really the heart of your question, because much of the confusion around the topic of prioritization is around the language that's used to describe things like frameworks. So what I would say is, look, there are sorting techniques that

There are visual frameworks, which I shortened to frameworks. There are marketplace simulations and there are hybrid methods. There are four different types of approaches. Sorting techniques are as simple as stack ranking or paired comparison. Those are the two most common. You're just sorting stuff and you're using some heuristic to do it. Visual frameworks are

are visual, right? They're like in product work, like Luke Holman's prune the product tree, where you have a picture of a tree and there are things that are going to be more central and those belong closer to the trunk. And there are things that are less critical. Those are going to be closer to the leaves, but it's a visual framework.

So I distinguish between a sorting technique, which is more algorithmic and more mathematical, potentially. So rice ice things, which come to my mind as a marketer first, is it a sorting technique, essentially? A ranking method?

So that's a sorting technique. And you're using a specific set of criteria, like for rice or for Moscow, no pun, you know, what are the actual criteria that you're going to use? And criteria tend to be more closely associated with sorting techniques, whereas dimensions like importance versus urgency tend to be more associated with visual frameworks. So the Eisenhower method, which was popularized by Stephen Covey in his book, I think it was the

the seven habits of highly effective people. It might have been first things first. So you have sorting techniques with criteria.

And you have visual frameworks, which I shortened to frameworks, which involve dimensions. Before I go to hybrid methods, I would say marketplace simulations. Like, I always forget the name of this one. I don't know why it is. A good marketplace simulation is, you know, using like fake money, monopoly money to buy a feature, which is another one of Luke Holtman's methods out of his book, Innovation Games.

Luke wrote the foreword to my book. He's brilliant. If you haven't picked up a copy of Innovation Games, it's a fantastic resource, and you might actually want to interview him at some point. So there's sorting techniques. There's frameworks. There's marketplace simulations where you're actually simulating innovation.

how something might play out. And then there are hybrid methods where you're combining these things either together in one method, like AHP, the analytic hierarchy process, or you're sequencing or possibly developing tournaments where you're using different sorting techniques, frameworks, and marketplace simulations in some kind of order to produce a more sophisticated result.

Wow. It's a lot. That's a wealth of information. Going on a tangent here, sure, visual frameworks are visual, but frameworks in general, do you feel like you feel a difference between a framework and a method? And I'm very, very interested here because we have certain approaches here at Uselist that we...

advocate for and that we use as a marketing asset. Honestly, it all started with an Instagram story where someone said, if you're like 30 years old and you don't have your own something, something in your own method, then you are doomed. So we're like, we should call it a method. And, uh, or we call it a framework. Essentially you have a life cycle,

Segmentation. And we have atomic emails. We have two frameworks. But I would love to unpack what comes into the label of framework or a method in your understanding. Sure. If you look at the taxonomy or the ontology of the language, I would say a method is a higher order or a higher logical level than a

a framework or a sorting technique. So you have methods and those methods may be sorting techniques, visual frameworks, marketplace simulations, or hybrid methods, right? So the method is the higher order thing. You could consider method to be synonymous with approach, right? You have either a method or an approach and your method or your approach can combine the

any one or more of the types that I've outlined. Does that make sense? Oh, yes. Makes perfect sense. And also, finally, somebody has a good explanation for this. That's amazing. Your DGAP is a method. I'm trying to say that the DGAP is a process model.

Process model. Even a higher order. It's a way of thinking about moving through space and time, whereas a method tends to be more discreet. It tends to be more of an approach to solving a problem. Let's unpack your process model by using some examples or just generally in the industry of digital product development. We're all here for SaaS products, so let's imagine we're building a

a system, a SaaS product? What would be, and we're, of course, we have limited resources. We have a team of 10 people and limited money and 25 things we can be potentially doing. Yeah, sure. This is a great, great place to go. So, well, let's start with where is the request coming from? Let's say it's your most important flagship customer.

and they have a P0 critical bug, something is broken and data is getting lost or maybe a security issue has come up. And so starting with the process model of DGAP, you have to decide whether DGAP

D, decide whether taking the time to prioritize is the benefits of that are going to outweigh the cost of just simply reacting quickly. This is a situation where if you've got a P0 bug and you have a support model worked out and you have a customer success engagement plan and you have a competent product operations, design, development, engineering, and test team working

Don't prioritize, just fix it, right? Stop right there and go take advantage of the fact that you've got your most important customers having a crisis and you don't want to sit around and decide and debate and determine which sorting technique or visual framework or marketplace simulation and what the criteria are going to be like none of that.

You should have already done that and you should just go fix the problem. That's a very straightforward example. We have a very important customer with a very obvious important bug. There may be a less important customer with a somewhat important bug slash request. And also, it's not just about sorting feature requests. It's about interim. We also have other pools of incoming ideas and things we can be working on, things that are beneficial for the product audience.

Then we have like sales and marketing things that may relate to the product team, for example. And it's a bit more like convoluted than just prioritizing feature requests. Absolutely. No question about it. And part of the reason that I structure the book the way that I do is I start simple and it gets very complicated, right? Because large organizations are never faced with simple things.

choices and trade-offs. Large organizations are faced with conflicting

stakeholder views, conflicting market issues, conflicting imperatives, conflicting goals, conflicting priorities. And there's never just one of them, right? So you're often juggling hundreds of different things in different categories and at different levels of abstraction, right? Because sometimes they're big, sometimes they're small. And so the goal, if you will,

with prioritization is to be able to sort through all of that in a sensible way. And that's really what the book is all about.

And so chapter 12, for example, deals with the max prioritization pyramid. It's a method that I have, it's a visual framework, a method that I have been using for any number of years. The template for it is available on Miro for free. And it deals with different time horizons, right? Now required to run the business or approved investments, the future, which is later at some point,

and what's required to connect the now to the future.

And so you've got those different time horizons and now you've also got different categories, right? You might have new features and capabilities. You might have compliance and security. You might have automation and tech debt reduction, for example. Then you might have operational considerations or marketing or whoever. So figuring out how to wrangle all these different categories against different time horizons, against different categories,

grain sizes from large grain to small grain becomes the challenge of prioritization, which is why having a language and a taxonomy and a clear process methodology for understanding which tools to use when under what conditions makes it so much easier to know, okay, let's say we've decided we need to prioritize. That's my hope in writing the book that you're going to move beyond. Let's just react to

And let's move into the engagement model. Who are your stakeholders, right? For, and how are you going to prioritize those stakeholders? And what are your sources of potential priorities? Those I call those items. And how are you going to prioritize or how are you going to think about the criteria or the dimensions that allow you to compare one to the other? And okay, so let's get serious, right? So now you've got a potential priority, right?

How do you know it's a good one versus a bad one? And I make that distinction in like a potential priority has to have at least one attribute with a value. So let's say it's a car. It's got to have a color and it's got to have red, right? You can't just have a thing that's a car because you can't compare it to an elephant, right?

You have to be able to say, okay, a car is a thing. It has a color and it has an attribute and it has a value. And there may be other things like is it a car? Another attribute might be, is it organic or is it manufactured?

And if it's organic, is it living or is it dead? Right. And, or if you have, so you can't compare things unless you have attributes that are comparable and values that are comparable. And so moving through the process of saying, okay, we've decided we're going to prioritize. We know who our stakeholders are and which ones are important. We have, we're, we're increasingly clear about where we're going to get the information from.

to pinpoint what our potential priorities are and the information and metadata about those priorities. Now we're going to go through and gather information

all of that information, and we're going to arrange it in some reasonable way, deduplicate things, for example, clarify things that aren't clear, and so on and so forth. And then we're going to prioritize them. So in a complex environment, an organization where you've got competing imperatives, you've got competing goals, you've got competing strategies, you've got competing executives, it becomes critical to know who your stakeholders are, what their relative priorities are,

What the sources of information are, what the priority of the sources of information, which ones are more versus less legitimate, which ones are quantitative versus qualitative, and so on and so forth. It becomes, if you're not careful, very complicated very quickly, which is why so many people do it so poorly. One of the angles you touched was about items on the list being important.

somewhat homogeneous, basically having similar criteria. But the projects we're comparing very often are of different nature and you don't compare one landing page to another landing page as a potential project. It's usually like wildly different things. That's why we come up with some very abstract criteria to gauge them so we can sort of try and put them on the same line with some criteria.

For example, rice ice. Okay. I'm just using it because it's one of the most popular in marketing. We come up with very intangible numbers there, like very subjective, also hard to prove and depends on your mood in the morning, how you can do your rice ice. Especially if there are multiple people. Do you have any advice on figuring out these criteria? Absolutely. And I do address this in the book. It is not...

as comprehensive as I would like it to be. But I will tell you that when you are selecting

evaluative methods right you may want to use something that's more like the Fibonacci sequence that allows you to compare relative values of things rather than a straight ordinal list whereas it's very hard if you're using an ordinal method excuse me an ordinal evaluative approach to say okay I'm

Small, medium, large, extra large. What is the actual difference between medium and large? But if you're using something because you don't know, it's hard to know and it's very subjective. But if you use something like the Fibonacci sequence where you go one, three, one, three, five, six.

Eight, then the combination of five, because what the Fibonacci sequence does, it takes the previous two and it adds them up and you end up with, you know, from maybe one to 144, where the distinctions become increasingly large. It makes it a lot easier for you to say.

We're going to compare this thing that's obviously much larger to this thing that's obviously much smaller, rather than saying we're going to compare this thing that's arbitrarily large to this thing that's arbitrarily small. And so that's critical when it comes to estimation. It's critical when it comes to assigning values to the attributes for each item.

And it's part of why slowing down the process and being more intentional about it is so crucial to creating better plans and making smarter decisions.

A few moments ago, regarding a very important bug for the very important client, it was more about just do it and don't spend time prioritizing. But again, it's a spectrum of different levels when you're just not worrying about it and doing versus prioritizing to the top.

One of the examples of this spectrum was, for example, in the early days, me and my co-founder, Benedict, used to sit down and religiously prioritize the entire backlog every month, one by one. But then...

The reality hit and we also learned about the shape up method where you just need to pick one winner to work on next and it inevitably bubbles up. The most important issue inevitably bubbles up and becomes obvious, which essentially saves you hours of that prioritization work. When you don't have to rank everything, you just need to pick one winner and that's a different approach.

Yeah. And what that does is it speaks to it speaks to a question I get asked all the time, which is why are we so bad at it? And my answer is we're not. We're actually brilliant at prioritizing, but we're brilliant at it in simple, static environments. We're terrible at it in large, complicated environments.

organic and adaptive environments. So like all environments, like all environments. Well, but in a, in a situation with just you and a co-founder, it might actually be simple enough and static enough that it isn't too hard to pick something and run with it and adjust it if, if it's not right. But in a large environment, if you do that,

There's a very good chance it's wrong, and there's a very good chance you're not going to know it's wrong until it's too late. And there's an even better chance that once you figure that out, the results of that being wrong and it being too late could be catastrophic. I'd love some stories, if you have any, in your rich background. Sure.

So hiring is a great example of this, right? It is, you know, the rule of thumb in Silicon Valley is hire slow, fire fast. But some of the more humane and principled leaders will hire fast and fire slow. And the challenge with that is that you don't learn from your mistakes quickly enough.

The learning loop is broken because learning takes place when the results of your either advisable or ill-advised actions show up close enough to the decision and the action that you make, that you can make very clear inferences about your role in what you did. And so I'm working with a CEO right now who has had a tremendous, he's a wonderful human being.

incredibly smart, has a storied career in Silicon Valley. And yet he hires quickly because he's trying to solve a problem.

He doesn't get really clear about the criteria. He doesn't run a healthy prioritization process. And then when things go wrong, he takes a terribly long time to let the person go because he doesn't have a rich process model for holding the person accountable, for evaluating them over time, and then from learning from his own mistakes.

And so hiring is a great example of where you can apply prioritization in a very healthy way for not only the hiring process, but the onboarding process and the, so the recruiting process, the onboarding process, the performance management process, and even the process of firing. Hiring is like an object lesson in what happens when the outcome is disconnected from the decision.

And the time between those two things can be so large that it's very hard to fix the front end of the process because you don't realize that's where the problem is. You think the problem's with the person, but the problem's with your process. Can you elaborate a bit more on how you apply prioritization to processes? Because it feels like it can apply to your to-do list of sorts and your plans.

But the process is somewhat a different entity. I have a hunch that something about criteria and choosing how important they are, but I'd love to hear the detailed answer. Yeah, and I address this in the chapter on teams.

where I was working with a company called All Clear ID. It was an identity protection company. And we wanted to be able to identify an unsung hero, somebody who was working behind the scenes and making the company better, but nobody knew it. And we wanted to give them an award. And so developing a process for identifying the unsung hero

is a process that I outline in the book in great detail because it is such a great example of starting with nothing more than a rough idea of what it is we were trying to accomplish and then using prioritization as a way of getting from this rough idea to an actual repeatable method in a playbook that would allow us to every year pick a new unsung hero.

That's a great hook for our listeners to go pick up your book right now. I would say that prioritization is a deceptively tricky topic. The reason it took me 10 years from the idea to an actual book was because it took me that long to figure out how to communicate it to people in a way that would allow them to act on it in a pragmatic way.

It's not a simple topic, which is why nobody else has ever written a book on it. One of the challenges I'm personally facing in the marketing sphere is the challenges of attribution and measuring the outcomes of efforts in the past.

Because so many factors are intertwined and affecting each other that it's hard to understand if what we did helped or something else helped. And of course, we do have some qualitative insights from customer calls, let's say. And if we get enough of those, that becomes like a sturdy signal. But that never feels like a reliable system to me.

I'm a big fan of Annie Duke's book, Thinking in Bets. Are you familiar with that book? Haven't not read, but have heard. You would love that book and your readers will love that book. And it is such a beautiful compliment to a book on prioritization because what it does is it separates the plans from the decisions, from the actions, from the results, from the outcomes.

And it is very, very hard sometimes to know whether you made a good decision if the outcome is hard to tie back. Sometimes you have to look at the results and not try to tie it to the outcomes because outcomes are only partially in your control. And Annie does a brilliant job of explaining how to think about this by sharing her journey in learning how to play poker.

And so it's a very well told story. It is very memorable and it is very actionable and it is tightly related to what we're talking about here. I think it will directly help you. We will link to this in the show notes for sure. As we're approaching the end of today's episode, what is one do and one don't when it comes to prioritizing in the world of products? Yeah, I'm going to start with the one don't.

The one don't is the first thing in your morning, don't look at your email or your Slack or your phone or the news. Absolutely not. If you do that, I will tell you that guarantees that you are not going to be prioritizing as effectively as you can. And I see you smiling, which tells me it's probably what you do. I am very sure I'm not alone. Most people do that. The most effective executives don't.

The most effective executives tend to follow a pattern, which I've also documented in the book in chapters. I think it's in chapter nine where they pinpoint the thing that they are avoiding, whether it's a conversation, whether it's an activity, whether it's making a decision.

And they go deal with that. Well, that's just speaking to me too hard. That's like a sore thumb situation. It is. The magic of that process is that once you start doing it, it releases all this wonderful energy to go do it again. And my executive coaching clients almost always say the same thing, which is, I can't believe I was avoiding doing that because it felt so good once it was done.

So the morning boot routine, which is outlined, I believe in chapter nine of my book is a repeatable process for attacking the first 30 minutes of your morning. It's a lot like mise en place, which is the process that a chef uses to set the stage for cooking. And there's another book I can recommend there, but I'm going to leave it for now. The title of that book changed. And so I'm withholding the title because I don't remember which one to recommend right at this particular point, but yeah,

The notion of mise en place, which is spend the first 30 minutes organizing yourself and with prioritization. That's the thing to do. Fabulous. Thank you so much for bringing in your wisdom today. Where can people find your writing, your teachings online and where can they get the book?

Yes. The book, of course, is available at Amazon and all major online retailers. It's a specialty book. So if you go to a bookstore, you might have to order it. I'm easy to find because I'm Harry Max pretty much everywhere. So LinkedIn is where I spend most of my time in terms of social media. And I also have a website, harrymax.com. And you can reach me there. But I look forward to hearing.

Thank you so much once again. I can't wait to take a deeper look into the details after listening to this. And have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you. It was a lot of fun to be here. I enjoyed the conversation. I hope it's useful to your listeners. Thanks for listening. You can find a written recap for this episode at usaless.com slash podcast. Please help us grow by leaving a review on iTunes.