Return-on-Attention (ROA) Prioritization

A prioritization framework I created to align focus across all six products and remove urgent-critical churn — ranking work by the return it earns on the team’s scarcest resource: attention.

Problem

With six products and three stakeholder groups (Sales, Success, Engineering), every week produced “urgent-critical” asks that reset the roadmap and burned focus.

Approach

Score every ask by its Return on Attention, merge and defer against a single master list, and make the trade-offs explicit and shared — so prioritization is a lens everyone uses, not a negotiation.

Outcome

Urgent-critical asks dropped from three or four per sprint to zero, and all teams aligned on a single, predictable set of focus areas.