Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Set Their Team Up for Prioritization
Transcript
- Lucas: One of the questions I hear most from new managers is — 'Everything on my team's plate feels urgent. How do I help them figure out what actually matters?' And the honest answer is, most of us default to treating prioritization like a personal productivity problem. You make a to-do list, you rank it, you move on. Luna: Right, like it's a solo brain exercise. But you're managing a team now — so prioritization is actually a group coordination problem. Lucas: Exactly. And there's this concept I came across recently called 'priority debt' — it's the accumulation of tasks that were started but never finished because the team kept jumping to the next 'most important' thing. It's the managerial equivalent of tech debt. Luna: Oh, I love that framing. So it's not just about choosing what to do — it's about the cost of not finishing what you started. Lucas: Precisely. And new managers are especially prone to this because they want to be responsive. A stakeholder emails, the CEO drops by, a teammate has a 'quick ask' — and suddenly the team has four half-finished projects and zero clarity on which one actually goes to market next month. Luna: So what's a concrete framework they can teach their team this week? Lucas: I like the 'must-do, should-do, could-do' grid — but with a twist. The standard version is too vague. People throw everything into 'must-do' because they can't say no. So instead, you add a time budget. You say: 'We have 40 person-hours this week. Must-do gets 30 hours. Should-do gets 8 hours. Could-do gets 2 hours — if there's any left.' Luna: That forces real trade-offs. If you can only fit one must-do, you have to argue for why it's the one. Lucas: Right. And you do this as a team, in a 15-minute standing meeting every Monday. Call it a 'weekly triage.' The manager facilitates, but the team brings their own proposals. The goal isn't for you to decide — it's for the team to learn how to decide together. Luna: That's interesting because it also builds their judgment. They stop coming to you with every 'what should I do next?' and start thinking through sequencing themselves. Lucas: Exactly. And the data backs this up. I was reading a case study from a mid-sized SaaS company — they had a product team that was running 12 active projects simultaneously. Nothing shipped on time. They cut it to 4, and their throughput actually increased by about 40 percent over the next quarter. Luna: Wait — fewer projects, more output? That seems counterintuitive until you remember context switching costs. Every time a developer switches tasks, it takes 20 minutes to regain focus. Lucas: Exactly. And that's just the cognitive cost. There's also the coordination cost — more projects means more meetings, more status updates, more context handoffs. So the new manager's job is to protect the team from that sprawl. Luna: OK but what about the stakeholder who insists everything is top priority? The classic 'all of these are P0' scenario. Lucas: That's the hardest part. My advice: don't argue priority labels. Argue capacity. You say, 'I hear you that these three things are critical. Here's what we can deliver in the next two weeks if we focus on one. Which one should it be? And if you need all three, here's the impact on timeline for each.' Luna: So you're framing it as a resource constraint, not a disagreement about importance. That's harder to push back on. Lucas: Exactly. And if they still insist everything is top priority, you ask them to rank them with a simple question: 'If we could only do one, which one would you pick?' That almost always reveals a real order. Luna: One thing I've seen new managers overlook is that prioritization isn't a one-time exercise. It's a weekly rhythm. You have to re-triage because new stuff comes in. Lucas: Absolutely. And you have to make the triage visible. Put the grid on a shared board or doc. When a new request comes in mid-week, the team can see: 'OK, this looks like a should-do, but our should-do bucket is full. So we'd need to swap something out.' The manager doesn't have to be the bottleneck. Luna: That's empowering. It also reduces the 'I didn't know we were deprioritizing that' surprises at the end of the week. Lucas: Right. And here's a pitfall I want to flag: new managers often over-rotate on short-term priorities. They fix the fires this week, but they never schedule time for the strategic work — the stuff that matters in three months. So I tell them to reserve at least 10 percent of the team's capacity for 'non-urgent important' work. Luna: That's the Eisenhower Matrix applied to capacity planning. The urgent stuff screams, but the important stuff builds your competitive advantage. Lucas: Exactly. And if you don't protect that 10 percent, you end up in a permanent firefighting mode. The team gets burned out, and the business never moves forward strategically. Luna: You know, this whole conversation is a great example of why we do this show — to give new managers concrete tools they can use Monday morning. Lucas: That's the goal. And if today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to keep the conversations going. Every contribution goes right back into making these episodes. Lucas: So back to the triage rhythm — one thing I want to emphasize is that you don't need a fancy tool. A whiteboard, a shared doc, even a spreadsheet works. The discipline is the meeting, not the software. Luna: And it doesn't have to be long. Fifteen minutes, standing, with a clear agenda: what's done, what's next, what's blocked. Lucas: Right. And the manager's role is to enforce the time budget. If someone wants to add a new must-do, they have to identify what must-do gets demoted. That's the muscle you're building. Luna: I think that's the key insight of this whole episode: prioritization is a team skill, not a manager directive. You're teaching them how to think about trade-offs. Lucas: Exactly. And the best new managers I've seen don't have perfectly prioritized teams — they have teams that can re-prioritize quickly when things change. That adaptability is the real goal.