Changing priorities is a common thing in all startups and scale-ups. And probably one of the most annoying. But in my experience, changing priorities and lack of focus is often just a symptom, not the actual disease.
You can try treating that symptom by being strict with stakeholder management, banning changes altogether, or constantly adjusting and rewriting the same tasks — never really finishing anything. But that usually leads to frustration from lack of results, overwork, and broken relationships. Been there.
I prefer looking for what’s actually behind all these changes. Because, let’s face it, no one’s sitting there trying to make life harder for the team. It’s not the business owner stirring the pot. It’s not the project manager trying to ruin developers’ schedules. There’s usually a reason — and very often, it comes down to the business stage, leadership alignment, synchronization issues, or even something as simple as a lack of visibility into the full scope.
What this turns into is weekly calls on prioritization, constant realignment, oversynchronization, no long-term strategy, no focus — and a ton of things started but never finished.
From what I’ve seen, you can often track this kind of chaos back to a few underlying issues:
Experimenting Businesses
Early-stage startups experiment a lot — testing ideas, searching for their positioning and unique value, trying to retain clients. That naturally leads to shifting requirements and constantly changing priorities.
Fighting that only makes things worse. I’ve found it’s better when the delivery process supports that kind of flexibility — instead of pretending we’re already in a stable, predictable environment. Building delivery process to support changes becomes vital.
Lack of Product Strategy
If a company is doing everything for everyone and doesn’t have a clear unique value proposition — that’s usually a sign the product strategy is missing.
Sometimes demand is high and they grow organically, until they hit the scaling ceiling. Or the demand drops. And suddenly they’re juggling a never-ending list of initiatives with no clear filter.
In scaling companies, it’s easy to get too focused on whatever users or clients ask for, without checking back against strategy or product identity. I’ve seen tools turn into a messy collection of features where only 10% are used regularly, and the rest are maintained for one or two users — eating up resources.
Without clear focus, priorities drift. That’s just how it goes.
Lack of Goal Definition or Misalignment Between Leaders
The company might have a focus — but unless it gets translated into actual initiatives, and synced across leadership, priorities will keep jumping.
Sales and marketing might be pushing features that aren’t even scoped for development. And the usual “fires” and “emergencies” just keep popping up, pulling attention in different directions.
Misalignment Between Leadership and Execution Teams
Each team tends to have its own agenda.
Developers might want to try new tech. Sales and marketing push for automation. Operations want to be more independent from devs in their day-to-day. All understandable — but sometimes, those agendas not only diverge from the main company strategy but actively conflict with it.
And when nobody sees the full picture, those conflicts get masked as priority changes.
So… how do you align?
Over time I picked up a few things that helped stop the constant reshuffling of priorities — or at least reduced it. These things don’t always work, and it usually takes a few months (3–6 depending on company size, or, let’s say, bureaucracy size) to see real results.
I’ve done this using Jira, but honestly, even a simple spreadsheet would work. It’s more about clarity than tools.
1. Understand Who You Are and Define the Focus
It sounds simple, but this was often the missing piece.
A product might have started as a budget tool, but then added project management features because some users requested it. Problem is — they couldn’t keep up with real PM tools. New users came in with the wrong expectations. Marketing spent money promoting both directions. In the end, no one was really happy.
It helped just to have an honest conversation — with yourself, your team, leadership: Who are we? Who do we want to become? And maybe even more importantly, who do we not want to become?
If that’s hard to define, I’ve seen brand strategy firms help with this step.
2. Align Goals
Once there’s a focus, that needs to become a shared list of goals — with timelines. Are these yearly? Quarterly? Monthly?
I’ve seen different systems used — OKRs, scorecards, whatever. Doesn’t really matter. Even a lightweight version works, as long as everyone involved in decision-making agrees on what those goals are, how long they stay valid, and how progress is measured.
There are many systems for that — OKRs, scorecards, whatever. I won’t deep-dive into any specific one, but at the MVP level, you should have a list of goals, how they’re measured, and how long they’re valid. All decision-makers need to see and agree on them.
3. Uncover the Hidden Scope
Once the goals are identified, you also need to look for blockers or problems that could stop you from reaching them.
In software companies, it’s usually bugs and tech debt. Most of the time, goals are about developing new features to bring client value. But everyone forgets about the time needed to stabilize the solution, set it up for scaling, and cover non-functional requirements (performance, compliance, etc.). Tech debt gets ignored. As a result, features are released — but the solution becomes so buggy that user retention drops.
To avoid this, I’ve found it helps to run regression tests, review the codebase to identify potential scalability issues, and perform security and performance testing.
4. Visualize all initiatives in the company and attach them to a goal
Once goals are defined, all active initiatives in the company should be tied to them. That means listing all initiatives in one place and linking each one to a corresponding goal.
Clear visualization really helps here. You end up with a full list of tasks, plus an understanding of whether they’re helping or slowing down your progress toward your goals.
Only after this step are you ready for a second round of priorities review and roadmap alignment.
5. Prioritize against impact and effort
Once you have all initiatives in front of you, it’s hard to decide what to do — and what not to do.
To deal with this, I usually assess each initiative by effort and impact:
Impact – what value it brings toward reaching the goals.
Effort – how much time and resources it’s going to take.
You can add more prioritization criteria, but the bottom line is: you need a comparison tool.
Then I build a simple matrix to show which ideas bring the most value with the least effort. Personally, I prefer to take three low-effort, high-impact initiatives, plus one strategic one (high effort, high value). This keeps the number of running initiatives manageable and allows for real focus.
Summary
In the end, I suggest visualizing this for all stakeholders and teams in the company. That way, everyone understands where we’re going.
This kind of alignment can be done by anyone who’s interested — CEO, COO, Product Manager, even a Project Manager. I won’t lie — it’s an ungrateful and high-effort exercise, often involving some politics and internal motivation.
But the reward is no more constant priority changes, a system for addressing all requests against shared goals, a clearer understanding of the company strategy, and more autonomy for developers and other team members — because they can now make meaningful decisions.
It’s also worth saying that this framework can be very lightweight. You don’t need 10-hour workshops. Each company can pick what makes sense for them at this stage. Because let’s be honest — keeping goals alignment too complicated might get you stuck in planning forever.
On the other hand, does it make sense to do anything if you don’t know where you’re going?
About Me
I’ve spent the last 18 years running a software development company and helping others set up their product and delivery teams for success. These days, I work as an external consultant, supporting startups and scale-ups in aligning their product strategy, delivery processes, and internal teams. If you’re tired of shifting priorities and looking for structure that actually works, I’d be happy to connect.