By definition, there can only be one thing at the top of a list of priorities. Equally, you can only focus on one thing at a time – that’s what “focus” means.
This should be a simple idea, but it’s clearly not given the number of times I’ve heard people say “x is one of our top priorities”. That means nothing is your top priority.
That can be fine too, of course. But it’s not what people usually mean.
I was reminded of this when reading “Security Is Our Top Priority” is BS:
Security is limitless. You can always spend more effort to make things more secure. The same goes for quality, safety, employee happiness, etc.
In reality there are always competing priorities and you have to balance and rebalance regularly. This should be done regularly, but not so frequently that it becomes disruptive context switching.
At Arcjet we review our product roadmap every week. Everyone has a single P0 item assigned to them i.e. what they’re working on right now. Projects usually last a few weeks so we try to avoid switching things out each week, but that has happened once or twice. Sometimes customer feedback or a production issue means we need to change someone’s P0. But it’s rare.
The principle is that each person only has one focus. One priority.