Prioritization and Dependencies

At Level 3, prioritization becomes a collaborative and contextual act. You not only manage your own scope—you help others stay aligned and adjust to changing priorities. You look across the team, product, or initiative to ensure that what's being worked on reflects current needs, constraints, and opportunities. You manage dependencies across teams, anticipate blockers before they hit, and make tradeoffs visible so teams can deliver the most value with the time they have.

Key Behaviors

  • Prioritizes work based on business impact, risk, and technical cost
  • Proactively helps teammates re-align when priorities shift
  • Flags cross-team dependencies and ensures ownership is clear
  • Uses planning tools (e.g. roadmaps, sprints, milestones) to coordinate priorities
  • Makes hard tradeoffs when needed and clearly communicates rationale

Common Struggles

  • Can overstep boundaries by reprioritizing others' work without alignment
  • May struggle to say no to competing priorities or unclear requests
  • Might unintentionally deprioritize important but invisible work (e.g. tech debt)

Success Indicators

You know you're successful when you:

  • Contribute meaningfully to team planning and sprint scoping
  • Are a source of clarity when priorities are unclear or in conflict
  • Surface misaligned priorities and propose resolutions
  • Keep dependencies visible and proactively resolve them
  • Create focus and confidence by simplifying, sequencing, and communicating tradeoffs

Mindset Shift

From:

"I help my team prioritize well."

To:

"I help the organization align around what matters most."

Questions to Ask Yourself

  • Where is our current prioritization breaking down?
  • How well do our plans reflect our goals and constraints?
  • What would bring more clarity and focus to this team or initiative?

Build These Habits

  • 1
    Invite challenge or alternative viewpoints to surface hidden tradeoffs — differing perspectives can reveal constraints, assumptions, or impacts that may not be obvious from a single point of view
  • 2
    Share your prioritization logic and ask for others' input
  • 3
    Look upstream and downstream to assess impact of shifting priorities

Seek Feedback

  • "Was the reasoning behind this tradeoff clear?"
  • "What's missing from our prioritization conversations?"
  • "Where do I tend to under- or over-prioritize?"

Signals You're Ready to Level Up

  • Teams look to you to help bring prioritization clarity
  • Your tradeoff decisions are trusted and well-communicated
  • You influence how prioritization happens, not just what's prioritized

Focus Summary

  • Align
  • adapt
  • and clarify
  • Prioritize for collective momentum

At Level 3, you bring not just order to chaos, but confidence to ambiguity. You help others see the why behind the what, and that clarity accelerates everything.