Prioritizing Initiatives for Delivery

In the world of software development, the greatest challenge isn’t necessarily building a great product—it’s building one efficiently. Projects that are delayed or go over budget usually fail, regardless of how innovative the idea might be. That’s why synchronized delivery is such a critical part of the Blueprint Agile process.

In the early days of Brandcave, we used a more traditional Waterfall model to manage design and development implementation. Design happened first, and development waited around until the designs were done. The result was always the same; the development team was mostly unproductive until my team’s work was finished. Sure, they could work on the backend while my team designed the frontend, but that can only keep them occupied for so long, and a typical UX design implementation takes two to three months with Brandcave. Inevitably, teams become unproductive.

Synchronized delivery helps better align design and development teams. It allows your design team to stay just ahead of development, creating enough breathing room to allow for creativity and problem-solving without disrupting productivity. Instead of a rigid hand-off from design to development, both teams work in parallel, but on staggered timelines. The goal is to ensure that no one’s waiting around, no one’s rushing to catch up, and, most importantly, you avoid rework that can derail your project.

For very obvious reasons, you don’t want your UX team to be working on the same feature at the same time as your development team. If you’re working concurrently on the same feature, your development team will likely implement something that gets changed before the end of the sprint. It’s frustrating for the development team because the prototypes will become a moving target. We want to make UX a relief for the development team, not a burden, to make sure the development team uses UX as a source of truth—not like how I use speed limit signs.

But synchronized delivery requires careful planning beforehand to get it right. The UX implementation must align with how the development team triages their work, ensuring easy collaboration and a smooth handoff of design assets. At the same time, all aspects of the implementation—design, development, and beyond—must align with what will best serve the broader business goals.

Before anyone designs a page in Figma or writes a line of code, your team needs to decide which features matter most—based not just on gut instinct or internal politics, but on measurable business impact. In this chapter, we’ll walk through a structured approach to defining goals, gathering input across teams, and scoring initiatives fairly. This process is the first step in making synchronized delivery possible, ensuring your implementation time is focused, productive, and strategic.

Getting Ready

Before you start creating epics or divvying out Jira tickets, take a step back. Initiative prioritization isn’t just about organizing tasks—it’s about aligning your entire team around a shared vision for what success looks like. This is the moment where product strategy becomes real.

Dust Off Your Blueprints

You’ve got your ERB, IAB, and user flowchart; now’s the time to actually use them. These documents lay out what your product is and how it works, and they’ll guide every decision you make about what to build first. Make sure your team has easy, shared access to them, whether that’s in Figjam, Figma, or wherever your collaboration lives.

Set the Ground Rules

Before you and your team can start scoring initiatives, you need to make sure everyone knows how the game is played. Which categories are we scoring on? How are we weighing them? Who gets to weigh in where? Agreeing on a system now will help you avoid circular arguments and arrive at decisions you can stand behind.

Get Everyone in the Room

Prioritization only works when all voices are heard. Sales, customer success, dev, design—they all see the product through different lenses. If you want a roadmap that actually works, you need input from across the aisle. That doesn’t mean everyone has to agree on everything, but they do need to feel heard.

The Process

Step 1: Define Your Business Goals

For synchronized delivery to go off without a hitch, your entire team needs to be on the same page, building toward the same outcome. For that to happen, everyone needs to understand and be aligned on a business goal. If design is focused on improving user flows while development is racing to ship a feature for sales, you’re going to run into delays, rework, and misalignment. That’s why the first step in prioritization is getting crystal clear on what the business actually wants to achieve.

When it comes to building a product, you don’t want to give the most focus to only what sounds exciting or what was promised in a stakeholder meeting, you want to focus on developing a product that will help you succeed as a business. When done well, this goal becomes your north star. It simplifies decisions, aligns teams, and gives your product strategy a backbone.

1.1. Clarify the Current Business Priority

What is driving urgency in your business? What’s the pressure point? To determine your current business priority, you need to look at where your business is feeling pain—and conversely, opportunity. This is your chance to zoom out and get aligned on the broader context before you get into the weeds of individual features.

Maybe you’ve hit a plateau in user growth. Maybe customer retention is slipping. Maybe your sales team keeps losing deals because onboarding is too clunky. Whatever the case, there’s almost always a core business priority hiding underneath the noise. Your job here is to name it.

Start by asking a few key questions:

What’s holding us back from hitting our targets right now?
What complaints or pain points are we hearing again and again?
Where are we seeing friction in the user journey?
What would create the biggest business impact in the next 90 days?

Once everyone agrees on what the most pressing challenge or opportunity is, you can turn that into a focused goal in the next step. You don’t need to solve the problem yet—you just need to name it.

1.2. Choose a Goal That’s Clear, Measurable, and Time-Bound

Once you know what you need to prioritize for business success, it’s time to turn it into a real, actionable goal your team can use to make decisions and measure progress. This can be where teams get tripped up, though. They pick goals that are too vague (“improve the user experience”), too aspirational (“become the market leader”), or too unfocused (“increase sales, reduce churn, and revamp the dashboard”).

For initiative prioritization to do what it’s meant to do, your goal needs to act like a filter. Every initiative you consider should be evaluated based on whether it moves you closer to that goal. That approach only works if the goal is:

Clear: Everyone should interpret it the same way.
Measurable: You can track success with real data.
Time-bound: There’s a clear window for achieving it.

We recommend setting goals by quarters rather than in weeks or sprints. Three months should give you enough time to see meaningful impact, but keep the timeline tight enough to stay focused. Here’s a format we like to use:

[Action] + [What] + [By How Much] + [By When]

For example, let’s say your business goal is: “Reduce time-to-close for new leads to under 24 hours by the end of Q4”. With this goal in mind, you’ll be able to focus on the initiatives that have the biggest impact on closing deals faster. When teams align on a common goal, it’s much easier to align on the initiatives that support that goal.

1.3. Sanity-Check the Goal Across Teams

Before you lock in your goal, let’s vibe-check it to make sure it holds up in everyone’s mind. Is it achievable? Is it aligned with what customers actually need? Can your team deliver on it within the timeframe you’ve set? Grab input from product, design, dev, and business leads. If your goal holds up under cross-functional scrutiny, you’re ready to move on. If not, take the feedback seriously and refine it. A solid goal should motivate the team, not confuse or overwhelm them.

Step 2: Identify and Score Initiatives

Once you’ve determined your business goal, the next step is to define the initiatives that will help you reach that goal. Each stakeholder in your organization should have a voice in this process, contributing their perspective on what needs to be done.

What is an initiative? An initiative is more than just a feature; it’s a combination of efforts that support a business goal. Initiatives often consist of multiple features or potentially epics. For example, if your goal is to reduce time-to-close, an initiative might be “Improve the onboarding process for users,” which could include features like authentication, profile setup, or first-time offer promotion.

2.1. Brainstorm a Broad Set of Initiatives

Working with your team, begin by simply proposing as many ideas as possible that could be things you need to complete to reach your business goal. At this point, it’s quantity over quality. You aren’t debating feasibility or complexity quite yet, you’re just trying to surface all options.

To help you brainstorm ideas for initiatives, you may want to look at:

User feedback and support tickets: What are users consistently asking for or struggling with?
Stakeholder wishlists: What’s been promised to sales prospects, leadership, or investors?
Customer success insights: What’s driving existing users to churn or hesitate to renew?
Competitor research: What features or experiences are others in your industry delivering?
Analytics and usage data: Where are users dropping off, getting stuck, or underutilizing features?
UX research and usability tests: What friction points have already been validated through research?
Open product backlog items: What’s been sitting on the shelf gathering dust that could now align with your current goal?
Team suggestions: Your devs, designers, and PMs see opportunities every day! Tap into their observations.

Once you’ve got a solid list of potential initiatives, you and your team can start narrowing the field. The goal here isn’t to pick winners just yet—it’s to find alignment on what each initiative actually is and why it might matter.

For each initiative, define what it includes (and what it doesn’t), what problem or opportunity it’s addressing, whether it’s net new or an update, what part of the user flow it impacts, and what success would look like if it were implemented. Don’t get carried away writing full-fledged requirements. You are just establishing a shared understanding of what each idea actually entails. All team members should agree on the definition.

As your defining initiatives, this is a good time to gut-check their alignment with your business goal. This is a simple yes or no decision. If the connection is fuzzy or forced, it probably doesn’t belong on your shortlist. You don’t want to waste time scoring initiatives that everyone already knows are not viable at this time.

2.2. Build Your Scoring Framework

Once you have your initiatives laid out, it’s time to create a shared system for evaluating them. Every team brings a different perspective; sales is focused on closing deals, customer success wants to reduce churn, and development is all about ensuring stability and scalability.

Unfortunately, if we prioritize everything, we prioritize nothing. We need a system for scoring initiatives and managing prioritization in a way that is fair to everyone, and most importantly, maximizes the success of the business.

Below is an example initiative prioritization spreadsheet that I use during this exercise. You can use this spreadsheet as a template for prioritizing your own initiatives.

First, list each initiative that will need to be completed in the first column of your spreadsheet. For clarity’s sake, you may want to give each initiative a brief description, and if you are working with an existing system, you may also want to call out if the initiative introduces net new functionality or is an update to existing functionality.

Next, add a column for every business unit that needs to weigh in on the priority. In my version of the spreadsheet, I include:

Development Impact: How much development lift does this initiative require? This column represents the development team.
Sales Impact: How much will this initiative contribute to new sales? This column represents the sales team.
Churn Impact: How much will this initiative reduce customer churn? This column represents the customer success team.

You can add others—such as UX, operations, or marketing impact—depending on your org structure, but don’t overcomplicate it. Add too many business units and your prioritization efforts just become noise.

You may have already considered that not all categories deserve equal weight in this process. Depending on your current goal, you’ll need to assign weights to reflect what matters most right now. This weighting process ensures your scores don’t just reflect what’s loudest in the room, but what’s most aligned to your business goal. The “Settings” tab of my spreadsheet will allow you to give each category a score. Just be sure that the total score of your business categories equals 1.

For example, if you’re developing a new application, you may decide to weigh churn very low and sales very high. Your weights might look like this:

Development: 0.3
Sales: 0.6
Churn: 0.1

If you are improving an existing application, you may instead decide to weigh churn higher, and your weights might look more like this:

Development: 0.3
Sales: 0.4
Churn: 0.3

In just about every case, you should consider UX design to be the easiest part of the implementation process. The lift required by UX will always be fairly low in comparison to development. Something very simple for a designer to mock up—such as a filtering modal—may take a developer much longer to configure on the backend. That’s why I don’t normally include UX as a category when I weigh prioritization. You may feel differently, though, and decide to include it.

2.3. Score Collaboratively, Not in a Vacuum

Now it’s time to score. For each initiative, invite relevant stakeholders to give it a score from 1 to 10 in each category. You can do this live in a working session, or asynchronously if your team is good at prep work. Either way, make sure everyone has access to the same information and definitions.

Make sure that everyone is clear on what the scores mean. For instance:

Sales Impact (1-10): the higher the score, the greater the business value
Churn Impact (1-10): the higher the score, the greater the churn reduction value
Developer Lift (1-10): the higher the score, the lower effort (faster) to develop

Higher numbers are better than lower numbers, but “better” means different things to different stakeholders.

Step 3: Prioritize Initiatives

You’ve clarified your business goal, defined your initiatives, and scored them across key dimensions. Now, it’s time to make some decisions. The goal of this step is to take your team’s input and create a roadmap that makes sense for your team, your product, and your business objectives.

3.1. Sort by Weighted Score

Start by ranking your initiatives from highest to lowest based on their total weighted score. This gives you a rough draft of your priority list. Don’t treat it as gospel, but do treat it as your baseline. It reflects the collective input of your team and gives you a data-driven starting point for discussion.

This list should immediately surface your top contenders—those initiatives most likely to drive meaningful impact with reasonable effort. But it should also spark questions, like:

Why did a high-impact feature score low?
Is a low-effort update hiding outsized value?
Are there small wins that can be bundled together to hit the goal faster?

I would encourage everyone on your team to take a critical look at the list of ranked initiatives and share their takeaways with the group. If it looks spot on, that’s great! If it doesn’t, what would you change? The goal here is to come to a consensus as a team on how to best achieve your business goal, so be sure to give space for open and frank discussion at this time.

3.2 Other Considerations

Your spreadsheet will be able to help you weigh impact and effort, but there are a few factors to consider that the spreadsheet can’t easily reflect. So, take a step back from your list and look at the big picture for a minute.

Ask yourself:

Are there any dependencies? Does one initiative unlock another? Should something come first even if it scored lower?
Do you have the capacity or expertise you need? Are the people who need to lead this work available now or tied up elsewhere? Do you first need to find and hire new talent?
Are there timing windows to hit? Is there a trade show, seasonality, or internal deadline that makes one initiative more urgent than it looks on paper?
What’s the customer impact? Will this change require communication, onboarding, or support that you need to plan for?
Are you taking on too much risk at once? Is your top batch of initiatives full of unknowns or complex dependencies?

These kinds of questions will help you sanity-check your priority list. If something feels off, talk it through with your team. Adjust as needed. Remember, the prioritization score is a guide—not a mandate.

3.3. Lock in the First Wave of Work

Once you’ve refined the list, it’s time to decide which initiatives make the cut for your first phase of implementation. Think of this as your MVP+ roadmap: the work that moves the needle in the next three or so months. You don’t need your roadmap for the next year to be set in stone at this point. Right now, you’re locking in a short-term plan that’s grounded in strategy but flexible enough to adapt.

In the next two chapters, you’ll learn how the initiatives you choose here will be broken down into design and development sprints. By aligning on this first wave of work, you give both teams the clarity they need to move forward together—without waiting on last-minute decisions or shifting priorities.

As you’ve learned in this chapter, prioritization isn’t just about choosing what to build—it’s about aligning your team around what matters most and giving them a clear, focused direction. By scoring initiatives thoughtfully and weighing both data and strategy, you can have confidence that you’ve created a roadmap for your team that will actually get you where you want to go. Now that you know the stops on your implementation journey, it’s time to figure out how you’ll get there—that’s what the next two chapters will cover.