Title: Prioritization Frameworks — LearnCoachAssist

Q: What is prioritization?
A: Prioritization is the process of deciding what deserves attention first when time, energy, and resources are limited.

Q: Why is prioritization difficult?
A: Everything can feel important in the moment, especially when teams face competing goals and incomplete information.

Q: What does a prioritization framework do?
A: It gives people a structured way to compare options instead of relying only on urgency or loud opinions.

Q: What is the Eisenhower Matrix?
A: The Eisenhower Matrix sorts work by urgency and importance to clarify what to do, schedule, delegate, or eliminate.

Q: What is the RICE framework?
A: RICE scores ideas by Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort to support product prioritization.

Q: What is MoSCoW prioritization?
A: MoSCoW groups work into Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won't have for now.

Q: What is impact-versus-effort analysis?
A: It compares potential value against implementation effort to identify quick wins and expensive low-value work.

Q: What is opportunity scoring?
A: Opportunity scoring prioritizes where customer importance is high but current satisfaction is low.

Q: Why should criteria be explicit?
A: Explicit criteria make trade-offs easier to discuss and reduce decision-making noise.

Q: What is a high-leverage task?
A: A high-leverage task creates meaningful downstream benefit relative to the time or resources it requires.

Q: Why is urgency not always the same as importance?
A: Urgent work demands immediate attention, but important work shapes long-term outcomes.

Q: What is prioritization debt?
A: Prioritization debt is the cost of repeatedly choosing the easiest visible work instead of the most meaningful work.

Q: Why should dependencies influence prioritization?
A: Some tasks unlock many others, so their value is larger than their surface description suggests.

Q: What is a sequencing decision?
A: A sequencing decision determines not just what matters, but what should happen before something else.

Q: What is a capacity constraint?
A: A capacity constraint is the realistic limit on how much work a person or team can absorb well.

Q: Why do teams need a clear not-now list?
A: A not-now list protects focus while preserving good ideas for future review.

Q: What is stack ranking?
A: Stack ranking forces options into a strict order instead of letting everything remain top priority.

Q: Why can scoring systems still be flawed?
A: Scores can create false certainty if the assumptions behind them are weak or inconsistent.

Q: What is a prioritization principle?
A: A prioritization principle is a standing rule, such as protecting customer trust first or favoring reversible bets.

Q: What is the value of revisiting priorities regularly?
A: Priorities should adjust when evidence, constraints, or goals change.

Q: What is an example of a useful prioritization question?
A: If we could do only one of these this month, which would matter most and why?

Q: Why should stakeholder input be balanced carefully?
A: Stakeholder insight is valuable, but prioritization weakens when the loudest voice automatically wins.

Q: What is strategic prioritization?
A: Strategic prioritization aligns work with longer-term advantage, not just short-term busyness.

Q: What is personal prioritization?
A: Personal prioritization is choosing what work deserves your best energy instead of reacting to every request equally.

Q: Why is clarity of outcome important before prioritizing?
A: If success is vague, teams cannot compare options meaningfully.

Q: What is a durable prioritization habit?
A: Choose a small number of clear criteria, review them often, and protect focus from low-value urgency.

Q: What is the ICE framework?
A: ICE scores work by Impact, Confidence, and Ease for quick lightweight prioritization.

Q: Why should effort estimates stay humble?
A: Effort is usually more uncertain than teams think, so estimates should inform decisions without pretending to be exact.

Q: What is a good prioritization outcome?
A: The team understands what matters now, what can wait, and why those choices were made.

Q: Why does overcommitting damage prioritization?
A: When everything is accepted, actual priority disappears and delivery quality usually drops.

Q: What is a focus cost?
A: A focus cost is the penalty paid when too many parallel priorities fragment attention and slow progress.

Q: What is a useful prioritization mindset?
A: Prioritization is mostly the discipline of saying no clearly enough that the right yes becomes possible.

Q: What is the Kano model?
A: The Kano model classifies features by how they affect customer satisfaction: Must-be, Performance, Attractive, Indifferent, and Reverse categories.

Q: What are Kano "Must-be" features?
A: Basic features customers expect; their absence causes dissatisfaction but their presence creates no delight.

Q: What are Kano "Performance" features?
A: Features where more is always better — satisfaction scales linearly with how well they perform.

Q: What are Kano "Attractive" features?
A: Unexpected features that delight users when present but cause no dissatisfaction when missing.

Q: What are Kano "Reverse" features?
A: Features where more actually decreases satisfaction for some users — over-feature warning.

Q: What is Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF)?
A: A SAFe prioritization formula: Cost of Delay divided by Job Size — schedule the highest WSJF first.

Q: What is Cost of Delay?
A: The economic impact per unit time of NOT having a feature done — combines business value, urgency, and risk reduction.

Q: What is the Buy-a-Feature method?
A: A workshop technique where stakeholders are given fake money to "buy" features, revealing real priorities through allocation.

Q: What is Opportunity Solution Tree prioritization?
A: Teresa Torres's method: link prioritization decisions back to a desired outcome through opportunities and tested solutions.

Q: What is the Value vs. Effort matrix?
A: A 2x2 sorting framework: quick wins (high value, low effort), big bets, fill-ins, time sinks.

Q: What are "quick wins" in a value-effort matrix?
A: High-value, low-effort items — usually the first to ship for early momentum.

Q: What are "big bets" in a value-effort matrix?
A: High-value, high-effort items requiring strategic commitment and careful planning.

Q: What are "time sinks" in a value-effort matrix?
A: Low-value, high-effort items that should usually be cut or deferred indefinitely.

Q: What is the 1-3-5 rule?
A: A daily prioritization rule: each day, commit to 1 big task, 3 medium tasks, and 5 small tasks.

Q: What is the ABCDE method?
A: Brian Tracy's technique: label tasks A (must-do, serious consequences) through E (eliminate); do all A's before any B's.

Q: What is "eat the frog"?
A: Mark Twain–inspired rule: tackle the hardest or most-procrastinated task first thing in the morning.

Q: What is the Pareto Principle in prioritization?
A: The 80/20 rule: roughly 80% of outcomes come from 20% of inputs — focus on the high-leverage 20%.

Q: What is the Pickle Jar Theory?
A: A time-allocation metaphor: large rocks (priorities) go in first; smaller commitments and busywork fill remaining space.

Q: What is the Ivy Lee method?
A: End each day by writing the 6 most important tasks for tomorrow, in order; work them sequentially until done.

Q: What is the Bullet Journal method's "migration"?
A: Periodically reviewing unfinished tasks and deciding to move, schedule, or drop them — built-in prioritization hygiene.

Q: What is "two-minute rule" prioritization?
A: If a task takes under 2 minutes, do it immediately rather than scheduling it — from Getting Things Done.

Q: What is GTD's prioritization layer?
A: GTD uses context, time available, energy, and priority (in that order) to pick the next action.

Q: What is the HiPPO problem?
A: "Highest-Paid Person's Opinion" — when prioritization defaults to the most senior person rather than the strongest evidence.

Q: What is the "shiny object" anti-pattern?
A: Repeatedly chasing new ideas before finishing or learning from current bets — fragments execution.

Q: What is the "loudest voice" anti-pattern?
A: Letting whoever escalates most aggressively drive the queue, distorting priority away from actual impact.

Q: What is the squeaky-wheel trap?
A: Allocating disproportionate attention to whoever complains most rather than to whoever creates most value.

Q: What is "scope creep" in prioritization?
A: When agreed-upon work silently expands until other priorities lose room — usually undermines focus on what was committed.

Q: What is RICE Reach?
A: The number of users or events affected per time period — first input in the RICE score.

Q: What is RICE Impact?
A: A typically 0.25-to-3 multiplier estimating per-user effect: minimal, low, medium, high, or massive.

Q: What is RICE Confidence?
A: A percentage capturing how strong your evidence is for Reach and Impact estimates — prevents wishful arithmetic.

Q: How is RICE calculated?
A: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort — yields impact per person-month.

Q: What is the ICE limitation vs. RICE?
A: ICE skips Reach, so it can over-rate features that delight a small audience compared with broader-reach work.

Q: What is a prioritization scorecard?
A: A spreadsheet listing options against weighted criteria, totaling a score per option — encodes the team's value system.

Q: What is multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)?
A: A formal method that scores options across explicitly weighted criteria and aggregates them to support transparent choice.

Q: What is the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)?
A: A structured pairwise-comparison technique that derives weights from how stakeholders judge each criterion against the others.

Q: What is dot-voting?
A: A workshop technique: give each participant a fixed number of stickers to place on options — fast lightweight prioritization.

Q: What is the "100-point" method?
A: Each stakeholder distributes 100 points across options, forcing trade-offs and revealing intensity of preference.

Q: What is a roadmap prioritization tier?
A: A bucket like Now/Next/Later that communicates relative timing without overcommitting to exact dates.

Q: What is the "Now/Next/Later" roadmap format?
A: Janna Bastow's lightweight roadmap structure used to set expectations while preserving flexibility.

Q: What is theme-based prioritization?
A: Grouping work by strategic theme (e.g., "reduce churn") so individual items get evaluated against a theme goal.

Q: What is OKR-aligned prioritization?
A: Prioritizing work that demonstrably moves a Key Result; items that don't align get questioned or dropped.

Q: What is opportunity backlog?
A: A list of validated user problems, separate from the solution backlog, so prioritization happens at the problem level first.

Q: What is dual-track agile prioritization?
A: Discovery work and delivery work are prioritized as separate streams running in parallel.

Q: What is story slicing for prioritization?
A: Breaking a big story into smaller deliverable pieces so the highest-value slice can ship without the rest.

Q: What is the cost of a parallel WIP item?
A: Each in-progress item competes for attention, increases lead time, and raises the chance of context-switch errors.

Q: What is a WIP limit?
A: A cap on how many items can be "in progress" at once — used in kanban to force completion before new starts.

Q: What is Little's Law in prioritization?
A: Average lead time = Work-In-Progress ÷ Throughput — adding WIP without throughput just slows everything.

Q: Why is throughput a prioritization signal?
A: Low throughput often means too many parallel priorities, not too few people.

Q: What is the "stop starting, start finishing" rule?
A: Kanban guidance: a half-done item delivers zero value, so prioritize finishing before opening new work.

Q: What is a swim-lane prioritization view?
A: A kanban view that splits items by class of service (e.g., expedite, standard, fixed-date) for targeted prio rules.

Q: What is class-of-service prioritization?
A: Treating items differently by type: expedite items jump queues, fixed-date items get scheduled, intangibles wait.

Q: What is theory of constraints (TOC) in prioritization?
A: Identify the system's bottleneck and prioritize work that exploits or relieves it; other improvements are local.

Q: What is "elevating the constraint"?
A: Investing extra capacity at the bottleneck — usually higher-leverage than optimizing non-bottleneck steps.

Q: What is a critical chain?
A: The longest chain of dependent tasks accounting for resource constraints — drives total project duration.

Q: What is a parking lot in workshops?
A: A visible holding area for ideas worth keeping but out of scope right now — prevents them from derailing focus.

Q: What is a "no list"?
A: A list of work the team is explicitly not doing this period, raising the cost of new asks creeping in unchecked.

Q: What is the "kill criteria" technique?
A: Defining in advance what evidence would cause a project to be deprioritized — fights the sunk-cost trap.

Q: What is sunk-cost bias in prioritization?
A: Continuing to invest in losing work because of past spend rather than future expected value.

Q: What is loss-aversion bias in prioritization?
A: Over-weighting potential losses relative to gains — can cause teams to defend dying work rather than rebalance.

Q: What is recency bias in prioritization?
A: Over-weighting the most recent customer complaint or executive comment relative to longer-term signal.

Q: What is anchoring bias in prioritization?
A: The first effort or ROI estimate disproportionately shapes subsequent debate — counter by collecting estimates independently.

Q: What is the planning fallacy?
A: The systematic tendency to underestimate effort and overestimate value — bias prio toward larger error margins on effort.

Q: What is reference-class forecasting?
A: Estimating a new project's effort based on actual outcomes of similar past projects, not bottom-up plans.

Q: What is a premortem?
A: A pre-launch exercise imagining the project failed, then listing why — surfaces risks that should affect prioritization.

Q: What is a sanity-check question for new priorities?
A: "What would we have to stop doing to make room for this?"

Q: What is the cost of context-switching?
A: Each switch carries minutes of reorientation; heavy multitasking can erase double-digit percentages of productive time.

Q: Why do small teams need stricter prioritization than large ones?
A: Less slack means each "yes" excludes more — choices compound faster.

Q: What is the "boulders, rocks, pebbles, sand" framework?
A: A capacity metaphor: load the few biggest items first; smaller work fills around them without displacing them.

Q: What is the airline-overbooking analogy?
A: If everything is "priority 1" you're committing more than you can deliver — overbooking guarantees something breaks.

Q: What is the "if you have three priorities, you have priorities"?
A: A leadership maxim: a priority count beyond a handful means the list is a wishlist, not a priority list.

Q: What is the "say yes to the person, no to the task" technique?
A: Honor relationships while still declining the work — preserves trust without overcommitting capacity.

Q: What is "negotiated deferral"?
A: Agreeing the request is valid but committing to a later, named date instead of taking it now.

Q: What is queue discipline?
A: The team's habit of not letting new asks jump live work without explicit re-prioritization.

Q: What is the danger of a flat backlog?
A: Without ranking, every item feels equally optional — and the team defaults to whatever feels easiest.

Q: What is a "force-rank"?
A: Ordering items so each occupies a unique position; resolves ties that "high/medium/low" hide.

Q: What is the buying-cycle question?
A: "What would we pay to have this done by next quarter?" — exposes real value compared to feel-good prioritization.

Q: What is value-stream prioritization?
A: Prioritizing within a single end-to-end customer value stream rather than splitting work by internal team boundary.

Q: What is "discoverable urgency"?
A: Urgency that is real but hidden until someone asks; some priorities only surface in good 1:1s or office hours.

Q: What is "manufactured urgency"?
A: Urgency invented to pressure a queue jump; healthy prio cultures challenge it openly.

Q: What is the "calendar test"?
A: If your calendar doesn't reflect your stated priorities, your real priorities are whatever is on the calendar.

Q: What is the "money test" for priority?
A: Would the team pay actual budget to have this done first? Forces honest valuation.

Q: What is "tiered SLAs" in support prioritization?
A: Different response/resolution targets per severity tier, so true emergencies get attention without flooding everything.

Q: What is the FAST acronym for prio criteria?
A: Frequency, Audience, Severity, Time-sensitivity — a quick triage for support backlogs.

Q: What is the Moscow ambiguity trap?
A: Stakeholders inflate "Must" until everything is mandatory — strict caps (e.g., ≤60% Must) restore signal.

Q: What is the "stretch goal" risk in prio?
A: Stretch goals can pull effort from committed work if not clearly labeled as bonus, not commitment.

Q: What is "yak shaving" as a prio symptom?
A: Spending energy on prerequisite tasks of a low-priority task — sign the main item should be reconsidered.

Q: What is "value debt"?
A: The opportunity cost of not having shipped high-value work — accrues silently while teams stay busy on low-value items.

Q: What is "shrink the change" prioritization?
A: Cutting scope to the smallest version that still proves the bet — accelerates learning before larger investment.

Q: What is "expand the change"?
A: After a successful small test, deliberately scaling investment because the bet has been validated.

Q: What is a kill list?
A: An explicit list of efforts being stopped this period; broadcasts capacity recovered for new priorities.

Q: What is "first thing in the morning" prio?
A: Allocating peak cognitive hours to highest-impact work — fights the meeting/email default.

Q: What is a roadmap "confidence column"?
A: A column indicating how committed each timeline truly is — protects the team from false-precision asks.

Q: What is "lighthouse customer" prioritization?
A: Prioritizing what a representative target customer would value most, not what loudest internal voice wants.

Q: What is "jobs-to-be-done" prio?
A: Prioritize features that help users accomplish underlying jobs rather than features for their own sake.

Q: What is impact mapping?
A: A method linking deliverables to behaviors to actors to goals — only deliverables that move the goal stay in scope.

Q: What is the "smallest valuable increment"?
A: The minimum thing that, if shipped alone, would create measurable user or business value.

Q: What is value-stream mapping for prio?
A: Diagramming end-to-end flow and identifying slowest or highest-defect steps as priority improvement targets.

Q: What is "story mapping" for prioritization?
A: Arranging user stories along a user journey, then slicing horizontally to find a viable first release.

Q: What is the "walking skeleton"?
A: A thin end-to-end implementation prioritized first to prove the architecture before adding feature depth.

Q: What is "tracer bullet" prioritization?
A: Build a thin slice through every system layer first; iterate breadth and depth on top of the proven slice.

Q: What is "if you can't decide, the answer is no"?
A: A bias-toward-saying-no heuristic — preserves capacity when value isn't obvious enough to justify.

Q: What is "reversible vs. irreversible" prioritization?
A: Move fast on cheap-to-reverse decisions; invest more analysis in decisions that lock in long-term commitments.

Q: What is a "Type 1 vs Type 2 decision"?
A: Bezos's framing: Type 1 is hard to reverse (slow, deliberate); Type 2 is reversible (fast, biased to action).

Q: What is "decision fatigue" in prioritization?
A: Repeated decisions degrade quality late in the day — schedule big prio choices in the morning.

Q: What is a "decision log"?
A: A record of major prio choices and their rationale — allows future review without re-litigating context.

Q: What is the "fresh eyes" technique?
A: Re-rank the backlog from scratch periodically instead of only inserting; surfaces drift that incremental edits hide.

Q: What is "Marie Kondo" backlog grooming?
A: Aggressively removing items that no longer serve the goal; reduces cognitive load on every refinement.

Q: What is "backlog half-life"?
A: The point at which half of older items are no longer relevant — guides how aggressively to prune.

Q: What is the "interesting vs. important" trap?
A: Bright shiny problems can dominate attention even when they're not what moves the goal.

Q: What is "noticing what's missing"?
A: Asking what isn't on the list that should be — surfaces blind spots that ranking alone won't reveal.

Q: What is opportunity-cost reasoning?
A: Comparing what each option would prevent you from doing — clarifies trade-offs more than absolute value alone.

Q: What is "marginal value" reasoning?
A: Asking what the next unit of investment buys, not just whether the area matters in general.

Q: What is "if everything is a 10, nothing is a 10"?
A: Scoring discipline: when stakeholders rate everything maximum impact, the scale stops conveying information.

Q: What is forced distribution scoring?
A: Requiring a fixed percentage of items at each rating tier — prevents grade inflation.

Q: What is the "Wardley Map" technique?
A: A strategic map of value-chain components by evolution stage — prioritizes investments in stages where movement creates leverage.

Q: What is "play-to-win vs. play-not-to-lose"?
A: Two prioritization stances: investing in upside vs. minimizing downside; healthy portfolios balance both.

Q: What is portfolio prioritization?
A: Allocating effort across multiple bets (e.g., 70/20/10 core/adjacent/transformational) rather than ranking item by item.

Q: What is the McKinsey "three horizons" model?
A: Horizon 1 protects current business, Horizon 2 grows adjacent business, Horizon 3 invests in emerging future business.

Q: What is "ratio prioritization"?
A: Setting fixed ratios (e.g., 60% roadmap, 20% debt, 20% bugs) so different work types don't crowd each other out.

Q: What is "tech debt budget"?
A: A reserved share of sprint capacity for paying down debt — prevents urgent features from indefinitely deferring maintenance.

Q: What is "bug burndown" prioritization?
A: Setting a target bug count and prioritizing bug work whenever the count drifts above the threshold.

Q: What is severity-based bug prio?
A: Prioritizing by user impact (data loss > workflow blocked > cosmetic), not by who reported it.

Q: What is the "ringfence" technique?
A: Reserving capacity for a category of work that would otherwise be crowded out by urgent feature asks.

Q: What is "innovation time"?
A: A standing reservation (e.g., one day per sprint) for exploration outside the roadmap.

Q: What is the "stop the line" rule?
A: When a critical defect appears, all other prio is paused to fix it — borrowed from Toyota production.

Q: What is "build vs. buy" prioritization?
A: Comparing the cost and time of building a capability vs. purchasing it — buy when undifferentiated.

Q: What is the "is this our problem to solve?" filter?
A: Some requested work is actually owned by another team or vendor; surfacing this avoids misallocation.

Q: What is the "trojan horse" risk in prio?
A: A small-looking request hiding a much larger commitment; ask what done means before committing.

Q: What is the "tip of the iceberg" question?
A: "What else changes if we do this?" — surfaces hidden scope that should factor into the prio decision.

Q: What is "definition of done" in prio?
A: Knowing exactly what "done" means lets you size the item honestly rather than underestimating clean-up.

Q: What is the "minimum lovable product" framing?
A: A spin on MVP focused on the smallest version users will love, not just tolerate — sharpens scope decisions.

Q: What is "value vs. cost-of-delay" tradeoff?
A: Sometimes a lower-value item with high cost-of-delay outranks a higher-value item that can wait safely.

Q: What is "rolling-wave" prioritization?
A: Planning near-term work in detail while leaving later periods at coarser granularity — adapts as evidence arrives.

Q: What is "delayed binding" in roadmaps?
A: Committing to the next quarter precisely but only to themes beyond that — reduces premature commitment.

Q: What is the "Friday rule" for backlog grooming?
A: Spending dedicated time each week reviewing the backlog so urgent grooming doesn't disrupt deep work mid-sprint.

Q: What is the "five whys" applied to prio?
A: Repeatedly asking "why" on a requested feature to reach the underlying problem worth solving.

Q: What is "user-weighted" prioritization?
A: Weighting requests by how many distinct users (not requests) they affect — fights vocal-minority distortion.

Q: What is "champion-weighted" prio?
A: Asking whether the requesting customer is a high-trust design partner — their signal carries more credibility, not just more weight.

Q: What is "regret minimization" prioritization?
A: Jeff Bezos's technique: pick the option you'd regret less when looking back from age 80 — clarifies long-term bets.

Q: What is "what would 10x look like" question?
A: Reframes incremental prio toward bolder options that might be higher leverage than safe upgrades.

Q: What is the "if not now, when?" question?
A: Surfaces whether deferral is real or whether the item will never become more important than today.

Q: What is the "five-year test"?
A: "Will we still wish we had done this in five years?" — separates trend chasing from durable bets.

Q: What is "best-of-the-rest" anti-pattern?
A: Picking the strongest item from a weak set instead of generating better options first.

Q: What is the "blank-slate" prio exercise?
A: Imagine starting fresh with current knowledge — what would you build? Highlights sunk-cost-driven commitments.

Q: What is "two-pizza team" prio scope?
A: Amazon's rule: a team should own a domain small enough that two pizzas feed everyone — bounds prio scope manageably.

Q: What is the "manager schedule vs. maker schedule"?
A: Paul Graham's framing: makers need long uninterrupted blocks; prio decisions should protect those blocks.

Q: What is "interrupt budget"?
A: The team's tolerance for unplanned work this period; once exhausted, new asks defer.

Q: What is the "two boxes" approach?
A: One box for committed work, one for stretch — protects commitments while leaving room for opportunistic wins.

Q: What is "minimum testable change"?
A: The smallest experiment that would update your belief about whether to invest more — accelerates learning loops.

Q: What is "single-decision-maker" rule?
A: One named person owns the call after input — prevents committee paralysis when the team is split.

Q: What is "disagree and commit"?
A: Bezos rule: once a prio call is made, even those who disagreed execute fully — preserves momentum without forcing consensus.

Q: What is "the inversion" question?
A: "What if we did the opposite of the obvious priority?" — exposes unstated assumptions in the conventional answer.

Q: What is "second-order effects" reasoning?
A: Asking what happens after the immediate effect — important prio choices often have indirect cascades.

Q: What is the "what does success look like in 90 days" question?
A: Forces concrete near-term picture instead of vague aspiration — sharpens which work to prioritize first.

Q: What is the "if this is the only thing we ship this quarter" framing?
A: Tests whether the candidate item is genuinely worth the opportunity cost of the entire team's quarter.

Q: What is "shipping cadence" effect on prio?
A: Faster cadence allows smaller bets; slower cadence forces larger bets per release — affects which scope fits.

Q: What is "release-train" prio?
A: A fixed cadence releases whatever is ready; items not ready wait one cycle — forces planning around the train.

Q: What is the "feature flag" lever in prio?
A: Flags let teams ship incomplete features dark, decoupling code merge from launch — opens new prio sequencing options.

Q: What is "incremental rollout" prio?
A: Choosing to ship to 1% → 10% → 50% → 100% — lets risk-sensitive items still launch without all-or-nothing prio fights.

Q: What is "abandoned cart" prio metaphor?
A: An unfinished feature is like an abandoned cart — sunk effort, no return; either complete or remove.

Q: What is the "concurrent priority cost" rule?
A: Two priorities take more than 2x the time of one due to switch overhead; pick a single live priority where you can.

Q: What is "single-threading" a goal?
A: Assigning one owner with unambiguous authority on a top priority — Amazon's mechanism for moving important bets fast.

Q: What is the "boring but important" trap?
A: Critical but unglamorous work (security, accessibility, observability) chronically loses prio battles unless protected.

Q: What is "skin in the game" prio?
A: Whoever benefits should bear a share of the cost — exposes whether the requester values the work as much as they claim.

Q: What is "ringing the bell" for completion?
A: Visibly celebrating finished priorities reinforces the finishing habit more than starting new ones.

Q: What is "the asymmetric bet"?
A: A small investment with a large potential upside or downside — often deserves outsized prio attention.

Q: What is "barbell" prio strategy?
A: Concentrating most effort on safe known wins, with a small slice on high-risk high-reward bets — balanced portfolio.

Q: What is "convex" prio?
A: Favoring options whose downside is bounded but upside is large — small experiments with big potential.

Q: What is "concave" prio?
A: Avoiding options whose upside is bounded but downside is large — common in security and safety-critical work.

Q: What is "what would change our mind?" question?
A: Asks what evidence would cause a re-prio — sets a falsification standard rather than open-ended advocacy.

Q: What is "sunsetting" as a prio action?
A: Deliberately ending a low-value feature, freeing maintenance capacity for higher-priority work.

Q: What is the "carrying cost" of a feature?
A: Ongoing maintenance, support, documentation, and complexity tax of every feature — should factor into keep/cut prio.

Q: What is the "default no" stance?
A: When unsure, lean toward declining — preserves focus and forces requesters to make a sharper case.

Q: What is "premortem-driven prio"?
A: Imagining failure modes of the candidate priority and adjusting the choice or its scope to avoid them.

Q: What is "post-mortem-driven prio"?
A: Letting recent failure patterns shape what gets prioritized next — turns lessons into resource allocation.

Q: What is the "compounding work" lens?
A: Some work creates more capability that helps future work — prioritize compounders over one-offs when value is close.

Q: What is "infrastructure as priority"?
A: Treating shared infrastructure improvements as first-class items, not background tax — they unlock everyone else.

Q: What is "user research as priority"?
A: Investing in discovery work before committing build effort — wrong build is more expensive than learning.

Q: What is "writing as priority"?
A: Prioritizing time to write clear specs and docs — clarifies thinking and prevents downstream rework.

Q: What is the "two-week rule"?
A: If a prio item hasn't moved in two weeks, escalate or kill it — prevents zombie commitments draining attention.

Q: What is "drift detection" in prio?
A: Comparing what the team actually did vs. what it committed to do — gap reveals prio discipline issues.

Q: What is "Goodhart's Law" risk in prio metrics?
A: Once a metric becomes the priority target, gaming starts; metrics need pairing with countermeasures.

Q: What is "north star" prio alignment?
A: Every priority must trace to the org's single highest-level outcome — items that don't get questioned.

Q: What is the prioritization meta-question?
A: "Are we working on the most important things — and how would we know if we weren't?"