Target Prioritization

Overview

Every team says they know their priorities. Most of them are wrong. When you ask people to rank a list of features or requirements, the default answer is "they're all important." Target prioritization breaks that reflex by giving the team a structure that physically cannot hold everything at the center.

Draw a target with three concentric rings. The innermost ring is small. Only a few items fit. The outer rings are larger, holding more. You place each item where the group believes it belongs, and the constraint of the center ring does the real work. It forces trade-offs that conversation alone tends to avoid. Two people might nod along when everything is "high priority," but make them fight over which three things earn the center spot and you'll find out where alignment actually exists.

What separates this from a standard ranking exercise is the visual honesty. A numbered list lets you squint at items 1 through 7 and pretend they're all roughly equal. A target diagram makes relative importance impossible to hide. The thing sitting in the outer ring looks peripheral, and that clarity is the point.

When to Use It

• When your team has generated a long list of features, requirements, or ideas and needs to decide where to focus first.
• After a brainstorm or ideation session that produced more possibilities than the roadmap can absorb.
• When stakeholders from different functions each believe their priorities should lead, and you need a shared visual to negotiate from.
• Before scoping a prototype or sprint, to make sure you're building toward the right things.

Skip it when you need quantitative rigor, when the decision hinges on data you haven't collected yet, or when the list is small enough that a five-minute conversation would resolve it. Target prioritization earns its keep with volume and disagreement.

How It Works

Draw three concentric circles on a whiteboard, wall, or digital canvas. The center ring holds what is essential, the middle ring holds what is important but not critical, and the outer ring holds everything else that can wait.

Before placing anything, establish your criteria. "Important" means nothing on its own. Important to whom? By what measure? Agree on the lens (user impact, strategic alignment, effort relative to value) so the debate stays productive instead of circular.

Write each item on its own sticky note. Place them one at a time or in small batches, discussing placement as you go. The center ring should feel tight. If you can fit everything someone wants in the middle, the rings are too generous or the criteria aren't sharp enough. Expect to move things more than once.

When the board stabilizes, step back and read it together. The boundary conversations, not the final positions, are where the real decisions get made.

Tips

Set a hard cap on the center ring. Three to five items works for most contexts. Without a cap, the center expands until it means nothing.

Don't let seniority dictate placement. If the VP's pet feature automatically lands in the center, you've just decorated a decision that was already made. Use silent individual placement first, then converge as a group.

Time-box the session. Forty-five minutes to an hour is usually enough. If the group can't converge in that window, the problem is likely unclear criteria, not insufficient discussion.

Watch for "tertiary means rejected." The outer ring still matters. Frame it as "not yet" rather than "not ever," or people will resist placing anything there.

The Output

A visual map of relative priority that the whole team built together. The center ring defines your immediate focus. The middle ring is your next wave. The outer ring is your backlog of good ideas that don't belong in the current cycle.

This typically feeds into roadmap planning, sprint scoping, or prototype definition.

Related Methods

• Affinity Mapping: Comes before. Group raw ideas into themes first, then prioritize the themes on the target.
• How Might We: Comes before. Generate opportunity statements, then use the target to rank which ones deserve focus.
• Rose, Thorn, Bud: Comes before. Surface what's working, what's not, and what has potential, then prioritize those findings.
• Impact/Effort Matrix: Runs alongside. Both are prioritization tools, but the matrix adds a second axis. Use the target for fast alignment, the matrix when you need to weigh feasibility.
• Experience Mapping: Comes before. Map the full journey first, then use the target to decide which pain points or opportunities to tackle first.