The Three Questions That Replace Your 12 Priorities
You asked your top three people what to kill. They told you.
Now you’re staring at a list of 12 “strategic priorities” and wondering which ones actually matter. The board deck says they all do. Your leadership team defends every single one. And somewhere in the back of your mind, you know half of them are noise.
The Problem
Most scaling companies don’t have a priority problem. They have a disguised metrics problem.
Every department has KPIs. Every initiative has a business case. Everything looks important when you’re inside it. Marketing needs to hit pipeline targets. Product needs to ship the roadmap. Customer success needs to improve NPS. Sales needs to close deals. Engineering needs to reduce tech debt.
All true. All important. All competing for the same finite resources.
The Framework
The best framework I’ve seen came from a client. We were drowning in metrics - CAC, NRR, pipeline velocity, product adoption scores. He stopped me mid-sentence: “These all answer three questions, don’t they? Are they buying? Are they staying? Are we doing the work profitably?”
Are they buying? Everything about acquisition, conversion, pipeline, CAC - it all ladders back to this.
Are they staying? Retention, churn, NRR, product engagement - different metrics, same question.
Are we doing the work profitably? Gross margin, unit economics, burn rate, operational efficiency - can you sustain this?
Every metric you’re tracking should clearly connect to one of these three questions. If it doesn’t, it’s either noise or it’s so far downstream that it’s not a priority - it’s a tactic.
The Trap Most Leaders Fall Into
The problem isn’t that teams are tracking the wrong things. It’s that they’re treating everything they CAN measure as something they SHOULD prioritize.
Yes, improving onboarding completion rates might help retention. But if you’re optimizing onboarding while your product has a core value delivery problem, you’re solving the wrong problem.
Yes, reducing time-to-first-value matters. But if your sales team is closing deals with customers who aren’t your ICP, you’re going to churn them anyway.
This is about highest and best use of your resources. Including time.
Stress-Test Your Three Questions
What could derail this? Market shifts. Competitive moves. Internal gaps. List everything that could matter. Then decide: are you monitoring it, or acting on it? Most things are worth monitoring. Few are worth acting on.
Can your team actually handle this? A great strategy that overwhelms capacity isn’t strategy - it’s a burnout plan.
What does your history tell you? Look at the last two years. When did you lose focus mid-year? When did you stay disciplined? The pattern shows you what to protect.
The WIFM Test
Here’s how you know if your priorities are real: can everyone in your organization answer “what’s in it for me?”
Can your engineers see how their work connects to one of those three questions? Can your customer success team? Can the person managing your LinkedIn ads?
If the answer is no, you haven’t communicated priorities. You’ve communicated noise.
Clear priorities are measurable. Simple. And everyone can see how their work supports them.
What To Do This Week
Take your list of priorities. For each one, ask: which question does this answer? Are they buying? Are they staying? Are we doing the work profitably?
If you can’t answer clearly, it’s not a priority. It might be important work. It might even be necessary work. But it’s not a priority.
Then ask your leadership team: if we could only focus on three things this quarter, what would they be? Listen for what doesn’t make the cut.
That’s your signal.
What Happens When You Actually Do This
You’ll have fewer things on the roadmap. Fewer initiatives in flight. Fewer metrics on the dashboard.
Your team will be able to tell you what matters without checking their notes.
And the work that does get done? It’ll actually move the needle on one of those three questions.
Fewer priorities. Better decisions. Clear leadership.
Not because it sounds good. Because it’s the only way to scale without chaos.
If you had to explain your strategy in three questions, what would they be?
Fewer. Better. Clearer.