Priority Creep
Priorities, Part 3: You finally set your priorities. Now watch yourself blow them up.
Let’s say you did the work. You had the uncomfortable conversations from Part 1, you pushed past the excuses from Part 2, and you drew up a real set of priorities everyone agreed on. Great, you’re off to the races!
This is where most founders quietly blow the whole thing up. Myself included, and usually without realizing it in the moment. This post is about the two ways it happens, and how to stop yourself, because the person most likely to destroy your priorities is you.
First, you have to draw the line
Before I get to how it breaks, one more hard thing you have to do when you set up priorities, because it’s the part everyone flinches at.
You have a goal, and you have a list of things you believe will get you to that goal. But unfortunately you will always, always have more things on that list than you have resources to do. So you have to force-rank them. If you’re small/early and don’t have much data, use your intuition about which initiatives will have the biggest impact. If you’re bigger, like we were at Curated, a small strategic finance or BizOps team can help each team pull together a back-of-the-envelope number on the impact: revenue, new customers, cost savings, inventory turns, whatever proxy fits.
This is where teams push back. “This is a unique situation. It’s not possible to measure. We don’t know.” And my answer is: then you haven’t been creative enough about finding a proxy. There is always a proxy! Or worse, you don’t actually know why you want to do this thing. At this stage, your gut is not an answer. If you can’t articulate the impact, why is it on the list at all?
So you rank everything, and then you need to make the difficult, what can feel like impossible decision of drawing the line. Above the line gets funded and gets done. Below the line does not, for now. And staring at that line is genuinely uncomfortable, because below it are things you know are important and you’re choosing not to do. Leaders hate this. The way to make it bearable is to be honest about the future: when we finish the above-the-line work, we pull the next items up. You have to show people the path, or you end up in an endless circular debate where everything is needed, nothing can be cut, and no decision ever gets made. Or you put too much above the line and then force it down everyone’s throat knowing it’s too much. Most companies end up in one of these suboptimal situations because it feels more comfortable in the moment.
This is where “disagree and commit” earns its keep. It’s a phrase I picked up at LinkedIn, and it’s the tool that makes the line hold. As you’re ranking, someone in the room needs to be watching for who’s uncomfortable, who disagrees. Once the decision is made, whatever your decision-making style, you go back to the people who disagreed and you have the second conversation, out loud, in front of everyone. “I know you don’t agree with this order, but I’m going to need you to disagree and commit.” And they say it. They commit to executing, and to not relitigating it, and to not walking out of the room and quietly steering their team somewhere else. Because that’s another failure mode: everyone nods, but one person’s heart was never in it, and you find out months later when it’s created a mess. Get the disagreement into the open, have the uncomfortable conversation, get the verbal commitment, and then the line actually means something.
Okay. Now you’re really off to the races! Here’s where it goes wrong:)
Then you have to protect the line, including from yourself
The first way founders blow up their own priorities is anxiety.
You’re a quarter of the way in. The thing you bet on: the new product, the marketing push, the tool that was supposed to lift retention, isn’t showing results yet. And you start to get an itch. Maybe this was wrong. Maybe we should change course right now. That anxiety is the enemy, because the easiest thing to do with it is go straight to the source and start meddling with the priorities the whole company just aligned around.
When you do that, two things break. You throw away all the work the team did to build conviction in the plan. And you disorient people who were a quarter in, building momentum, finally feeling like they were executing well. Do it once and it’s thrash. Do it a few quarters in a row and you’ve got angry, disillusioned people, and eventually an attrition problem, because good people want to make progress, not relitigate the same plan every few weeks.
Your job as the founder is to protect the priorities. When the anxiety hits, take a half-step first. Grab a small group, a couple of people on or near the leadership team that you can bring that anxiety to before you act on it. Talk it through. Decide whether it’s actually worth blowing up the cycle. Sometimes it is. But if you’re doing it regularly, something is broken, and it’s probably you.
The second way is quieter, and it’s about power
This is the one that took me years to see, and it’s the reason I wanted to write this whole series.
As a founder, your job is to live in the future. You’re talking to customers, investors, people around the org, reading, going to conferences, thinking six, twelve, thirty-six months out. So of course you’re constantly generating new ideas and getting excited about them. That’s the job, and it’s awesome.
The right way to handle those ideas is to build a release valve: a parking lot where they get captured, memorialized, and pulled into future planning at the right time. At Curated, our leadership team worked with our BizOps lead to create this structure and it worked. The wrong way, which is what happens nine times out of ten, is you get excited and you go tap someone on the shoulder to “just brainstorm.”
Here’s what you have to understand about that shoulder-tap. It does not land the way you think it lands.
To you, it feels like: I’m just kicking around an idea with a smart person to sharpen my own thinking. No big deal. But there is an inherent power that comes with being a founder. It’s not an ego thing, it’s just reality. You built this. It was your idea. And for better or worse, that gives you enormous influence. So what the person on the other side hears is: the founder has a lot of energy about this new thing. It’s not on my list, but they came to me, so now it must be my priority. And because they’re a proactive, high-performing person who wants to do right by you, they say yes, or they don’t know how to push back, or they don’t have the confidence to. And they just... start working on it. Nights, weekends, pulling in a few teammates. And you don’t find out for weeks or months because you don’t meet with that person every week.
I know exactly how this feels, because I lived it. Four or five years into Curated, I had some ideas about expanding one of our categories, I think it was golf or snowboarding. I riffed with a couple of people on the team. To me that was the whole event: I got what I needed, probably to prep for a board meeting, and I moved on. A few weeks later I walked past a conference room around 6:30pm and saw a group of my business team huddled together. Something about it didn’t add up. There was no reason, in my mind, for those particular people to be working late together. So I did the thing founders get to do, I poked my head in and asked what they were working on. And as they walked me through it, I felt the anxiety come over me. They were building out the thing I had “brainstormed.” These people, who I thought were heads-down on the priorities we had all agreed to and written into the quarterly plan, had quietly reorganized around a passing idea of mine. And I realized: oh, shit. I didn’t set this up right. I never told them it wasn’t a priority. That person wasn’t doing anything wrong. They heard a founder get excited about a new thing, and they did exactly what a great employee does. They ran at it.
That’s how it goes. Sometimes you catch it in a few days, which is annoying but not terrible. When it turns into real churn is when you find out weeks or months later, and realize a chunk of your team has been distracted the whole time. All because you wanted to brainstorm. All good intentions.
The fix, and the mirror
The fix is simple to say and takes real discipline to do. Recognize the power you hold. Be conscious of who you’re talking to. And when you do want to brainstorm with someone who isn’t on your leadership team, frame it on both ends. At the start: “I want to kick around an idea. This is not a priority right now.” And critically, at the end: “Thank you, that was great. Just to be clear, I don’t want you to work on this. I’ll come back to you if and when it makes sense to prioritize it.” That closing line lets them off the hook. Without it, they will assume it’s a priority, because you came to them, and because they want to do right by you.
So here’s where I’ll leave this one. The next time you find yourself wondering why the company feels slow, why the team isn’t making the progress you expected, don’t start with them. Start with the mirror. Ask what you did, what passing comment you dropped, what shiny object you got excited about that pulled your people off the very priorities you asked them to focus on.
More often than I’d like to admit, the answer was me.
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