Virtually every product manager or product owner I worked with had this problem. There were multiple goals and all of them were "euqally important".<p>I started to explain that it's about risk management - the things we pick up first have higher chance to be completed on time, so I asked which ones would cause more trouble if they were delayed.<p>Sometimes that helped, sometimes it didn't. So these days what I say when I can't get clear priorities is this: if everything is equally important, then I'll choose what my team works on first, and I'll do it according to my criteria, which is what tasks do we find most interesting. Almost always the response then is "ok, wait, let me think and by tomorrow I'll send you the list ordered by priority".
I'm going to avoid dog-piling on Amazon - because I think that is too easy in this day and age.<p>Instead, I'll firmly agree with everything the author said about prioritization. I think he gave great examples and he is right. When you have 16 different "priorities" and "objectives" that are shared by each employee, you actually have zero priorities. I've seen leaders list many objectives, then say "these go to manager 1, these others go to manager 2, etc".
It sounds like the usual inflation problem, where "ultra high priority" means "will never be done", and "critical emergency" means "please consider it if you have time".<p>You can call it "50 shades of red" too, where it starts with green/yellow/red color coding then everything becomes red and you have to differentiate between reds. So in the end you have to choose between "deep red" and "crimson red of the darkest night". It was a joke in France during the pandemic where the entire map was colored red, with the shade of red indicating the level of restriction.
One thing I remember from my own time in AWS was that there was inherit tension in the LPs. Customer Obsession might have you spending months to find the product / market fit, whereas Bias for Action might dictate you should ship-to-learn. There was no priority in them - they were rubrics to help guide decision making.
If it keeps the product manager happy then what the heck. Especially for functionality planned months in advance. You waste time on setting priorities which are always wrong and change so yeah whatever. Meanwhile, keep doing what you're doing to get towards the MVP.
The same question goes to politicians: I appreciate you're for all the good and against all the evil. But if you want to achieve something you'll have to compromise. Where do you see this compromise to happen? Are you willing to give up on "undocumented migrant rights" for your UBI pet project? Will you soften your stance on mandatory school prayers to avoid tax hikes?