You can't set meaningful priorities for your team until everyone—stakeholders, team members, and leadership—are speaking the same language and understand what truly matters. This isn't about technical jargon or industry buzzwords. It's about having a shared understanding of what drives value, what constitutes success, and what the real constraints are.
The Vocabulary Problem
When teams struggle with prioritization, it's often because they're having different conversations entirely. Here's what that looks like:
Stakeholders say: "We need this feature by Q2"
Engineers hear: "This is the most important thing to build"
Product managers think: "This is a nice-to-have that we can deprioritize"
Leadership asks: "How long will this take?"
Team responds: "2-3 weeks"
Everyone assumes: They're talking about the same scope and quality level
These misalignments happen because each group has their own mental models, their own definitions of success, and their own understanding of what "done" means. Without a shared vocabulary, you're not just speaking different languages—you're having entirely different conversations.
Building Shared Understanding
1. Define Your Terms
Start by explicitly defining what you mean when you say:
- "High priority"
- "Done"
- "Quality"
- "Risk"
- "Success"
These words mean different things to different people. A "high priority" feature to a sales team might be "nice to have" to engineering. "Done" to a stakeholder might mean "shipped to production," while to a developer it might mean "code complete."
2. Create a Shared Mental Model
Help everyone understand:
- What drives value for your business
- What the real constraints are (technical, business, time)
- What success looks like from multiple perspectives
- What failure modes you're trying to avoid
If you're someone who likes a bit of math, frameworks like RICE (Reach × Impact × Confidence / Effort) can help operationalize this shared vocabulary into concrete priority scores.
3. Level Up the Conversation
Don't just accept the vocabulary others bring to the table. As domain experts, you have a responsibility to elevate the conversation by:
- Challenging assumptions about what's "simple" or "quick"
- Explaining the real trade-offs behind decisions
- Teaching others to think in terms of your domain's principles
- Helping stakeholders understand the long-term implications of their requests
When Vocabulary Fails
You'll know your vocabulary isn't working when:
- The same conversations keep happening without resolution
- People seem to agree but then act as if they disagreed
- "High priority" items keep getting deprioritized
- Technical debt keeps accumulating despite "agreements" to address it
- Stakeholders seem surprised by outcomes they should have expected
- Domain experts are frustrated by stakeholders' continuous "simple" requests without understanding technical limitations or scope
These are signs that you're having different conversations, not just different opinions. When this happens, domain experts need to step up as translators—helping stakeholders understand why "simple" requests are actually complex, and teaching others to think in terms of your domain's fundamental principles.
The translation works both ways: product owners and managers need to help domain experts understand the core business problems (revenue, margins, market pressure) rather than just presenting their preferred solutions. Focus on the problem, not the proposed fix.
When Seasons Change Everything
Shared vocabulary becomes even more critical during business seasons that demand different priorities. When times are good, priority setting can feel straightforward—you have resources, time, and flexibility. But during critical seasons, everything changes.
Survival seasons
(cash flow issues, market downturns, existential threats) require a completely different vocabulary:
- "Revenue impact" becomes more important than "user experience"
- "Risk mitigation" trumps "innovation"
- "Speed to market" outweighs "technical elegance"
Growth seasons
(funding rounds, market expansion, scaling) shift the conversation:
- "Scalability" becomes the primary constraint
- "Market opportunity" drives decisions more than "technical debt"
- "Team velocity" matters more than "perfection"
Transition seasons
(pivots, acquisitions, leadership changes) demand new mental models:
- "Alignment" becomes more important than "efficiency"
- "Stability" often trumps "optimization"
- "Communication" becomes a core priority
The vocabulary that worked during stable periods often fails during these critical seasons. Teams need to recognize when they're in a different season and adapt their shared understanding accordingly.
Conclusion
Priority setting isn't about ranking tasks or features. It's about making informed decisions about what matters most. And you can't make those decisions effectively until everyone involved understands what they're actually deciding about.
The next time you're in a prioritization meeting and things feel stuck, ask yourself: Are we having the same conversation, or are we just using the same words to talk about different things?
The difference between those two scenarios is the difference between effective prioritization and endless debate.