Is there one person responsible for all tech priorities?
Democracy isn’t necessary in business if you want to have everyone going in the same direction without mixed messages.
If there isn’t a single person who owns all the priorities you may be wondering why nothing gets done in time…
Delivering for your customers sets an expectation that you will get products to them when you say you will, and without error. Nothing slows down those deliveries like context switching does. When engineers have to shift their focus to put out fires or deal with ad-hoc requests from ‘the head of…’ it kills productivity. Something I’ve done for over a decade is to only have a couple of designated people to handle production problems on a rota basis. It prevents everyone from piling in to deal with an issue and the roadmap grinding to a halt.
A single person, let’s call them the roadmap owner (a CEO or a product manager), responsible for priorities on your tech roadmap is not a choke point. They are a necessity to get your teams focused on what is most commercially important and gives them the ability to say no to ‘just a little request’ that people try to slide in under the counter.
Other requests can be added to the backlog but they can only be requested for the roadmap owner to review and need a business case to justify being looked at (revenue projection or cost savings otherwise it’s a waste of time).
The roadmap owner will also ensure there isn’t an overwhelming number of items in flight. People need to feel that what they are working on is important and achievable. I tend to advocate for a top 5 or 6 items. Anything outside of that isn’t of interest to teams in the middle of getting the items assigned to them done by an agreed date.
Doing less gets more done!