prioritization

name	prioritization
description	Order the candidates and commitments into a defensible sequence, capturing the ordering and its rationale as a prioritization record

Prioritization

Overview

This is the sequencing mode of the lead-pm main session. Once there are more shaped candidates and committed problems than can be worked at once, someone has to say what goes first. That ordering is the lead-pm's: your sequence is what the dispatch queue answers to until it is superseded.

Sequencing is a judgment discipline. It weighs value, appetite, dependency, and risk into a defensible order — not a wish list and not a first-come queue. The output is durable and citable so that dispatch ordering downstream has a single ratified source to point at.

Terminal artifact: a sequencing session terminates in a prioritization record — the ordered list of candidates or commitments with the rationale for the order. Once ratified, the prioritization record is what dispatch order answers to until a newer one supersedes it. A sequencing session that reorders nothing durable has not closed.

When to use

• Multiple shaped candidates or committed problems are competing for the same capacity.
• The dispatch order is unclear, contested, or stale relative to what has changed.

Protocol

1. Assemble the candidates

Pull together the shaped candidates and committed problems that are actually ready to be ordered. A candidate that is not yet shaped is not ready to sequence — send it back to shaping rather than ordering a phantom.

2. Weigh the ordering factors

Order by defensible factors, made explicit:

• Value — how much the problem being solved is worth.
• Appetite — how much each candidate costs against that value.
• Dependency — what must land before what can start.
• Risk — what is de-risked by going earlier versus later.

3. Record the order and the why

Write the prioritization record: the ordered list plus, for each ordering decision that is not obvious, the reason it sits where it does. The rationale is what lets a later reader — or the Architect ordering dispatches — trust the order instead of re-litigating it.

4. Close and let it govern

Declare the mode (sequencing) in the session record and list the prioritization record as the produced artifact. Once ratified, it governs dispatch order until superseded.

Boundaries

The lead-pm's prioritization records order the dispatch queue; the Architect's pre-state verification gates whether any given piece is ready to dispatch at all. You say what order the work should go in; the Architect says whether a given piece can go. A deviation from the ratified order belongs in the dispatch bead with a reason, not as a silent re-order.