The Eisenhower Matrix Has No Place in Roadmap Planning

This is one of RoadmapOne ’s articles on Objective Prioritisation frameworks .

The Eisenhower Matrix—that famous 2×2 grid of Urgent/Important quadrants—gets recommended everywhere. Time management books. Leadership courses. Product management blogs. The premise is seductive: categorise everything as Urgent, Important, both, or neither, then Do First, Schedule, Delegate, or Eliminate accordingly.

Here’s the problem: the Eisenhower Matrix isn’t really a prioritisation framework. It’s vocabulary.

For product teams building roadmaps, Eisenhower doesn’t help you decide whether Feature A should ship before Feature B. It doesn’t quantify value, estimate effort, or account for reach or confidence. What it does do—and this is genuinely useful—is give you language that boards, executives, and stakeholders already understand.

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The Four Quadrants Everyone Knows

Dwight Eisenhower reportedly said: “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” The matrix that bears his name maps this insight into four quadrants:

The theory is elegant: focus on the top row (Important), distinguish between what needs immediate action (Urgent) and what needs protected time (Not Urgent), and ruthlessly eliminate or delegate the bottom row.

Why Product Teams Reach for Eisenhower

The appeal is obvious. When everything feels urgent and every stakeholder claims their request is critical, a 2×2 grid promises clarity. Plot your backlog on the matrix, and priorities should emerge.

Except they don’t—because the matrix has fundamental problems when applied to product prioritisation.

When Eisenhower Actually Helps

Before I explain why Eisenhower fails as a prioritisation framework, let me acknowledge where it genuinely helps.

Vocabulary for Board Conversations

When a non-exec director asks “Are we spending too much time firefighting?"—that’s an Eisenhower question. They’re asking whether the product organisation is trapped in the Urgent+Important quadrant at the expense of strategic Important-but-Not-Urgent work.

You can answer this question without ever drawing the matrix. Tag your objectives using Run/Grow/Transform , and the portfolio breakdown tells the story. “We’re spending 30% on Run, 50% on Grow, 20% on Transform” translates directly to “We’re investing in the future, not just fighting fires.”

The Eisenhower vocabulary helps stakeholders articulate what they’re worried about. The matrix itself isn’t the tool; the language is.

Spotting Portfolio Imbalance

I regularly see teams focusing almost exclusively on Urgent+Important items with very little allocated to Important-but-Not-Urgent. That’s a red flag. If your entire roadmap is firefighting, you’re never building for the future.

A healthy roadmap should have a mix:

• Some Urgent+Important: real deadlines, genuine crises, time-sensitive opportunities
• Substantial Important-but-Not-Urgent: strategic initiatives, capability building, technical health

When I see a roadmap that’s 90% Urgent+Important, I know the team is in reactive mode. They’re not prioritising—they’re triaging. That’s sometimes necessary in a crisis, but if it’s your permanent state, something is structurally wrong.

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When Eisenhower Fails for Product Prioritisation

The “Important” Problem

The matrix assumes you can objectively categorise things as Important or Not Important. For product prioritisation, this begs the question. If you already knew what was important, you wouldn’t need a prioritisation framework.

Every PM claims their project is important. Every stakeholder believes their request is critical. The Eisenhower Matrix doesn’t give you criteria for resolving these conflicts—it assumes the conflict is already resolved.

Compare this to RICE or BRICE , which define exactly what “important” means: Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort. You might disagree with the dimensions, but at least there’s a formula that makes disagreements explicit and discussable.

The “Urgent” Problem

Urgency is equally slippery. In product management, urgency often means “someone powerful is asking loudly.” That’s not the same as genuine time-sensitivity.

Real urgency exists: regulatory deadlines, security vulnerabilities, competitive windows. But most “urgent” requests are just poorly-managed expectations or stakeholders who’ve learned that calling something urgent gets it done faster.

The Eisenhower Matrix doesn’t help you distinguish genuine urgency from manufactured urgency. It accepts the urgency framing at face value, which rewards whoever shouts loudest.

The “Delegate” Quadrant Is Meaningless

In personal productivity, “Delegate” makes sense—you can hand tasks to colleagues or assistants. In product prioritisation, what does it mean to delegate an objective?

You can’t delegate Feature X to another product team without organisational changes that make “delegation” the wrong word. You can deprioritise it, defer it, or kill it, but the Delegate quadrant doesn’t map to anything useful in roadmap planning.

Everything Clusters in One Quadrant

When teams try to plot their backlog on the Eisenhower Matrix, something predictable happens: everything ends up Urgent+Important.

Nobody wants to admit their project isn’t important. Nobody wants to lose the political cover of urgency. So the matrix collapses into a single quadrant with 40 items, and you’re back where you started—needing to prioritise within that quadrant using actual criteria.

The WIP Limits Connection

Here’s an insight that most Eisenhower discussions miss: things move into the Urgent quadrant when teams have capacity to pull them.

If you’re practicing capacity-based planning , you’re allocating work to squads and sprints in advance. Work becomes “urgent” when it’s approaching the sprint where it’s scheduled, and the team is ready to pull it into their active backlog.

This reframes the Urgent/Important distinction. Your roadmap should allocate capacity to Important-but-Not-Urgent items—that’s strategic planning. When those items approach their allocated sprint, they become Urgent by definition (the team needs the work). The matrix isn’t telling you what to prioritise; the roadmap already did that.

This is why limiting WIP matters. If you overload teams with too many “urgent” items simultaneously, everything becomes a priority, which means nothing is. Constrain WIP, and urgency becomes meaningful—it indicates what’s next in the queue, not what someone is yelling about.

The Developer “Faffing About” Problem

One pattern I see repeatedly: teams spending significant time on things that simply aren’t important—and Eisenhower doesn’t help you spot this.

The worst offender is developers wanting to play with new technology. “We should rewrite this in Rust.” “Let’s try the new framework.” “I want to experiment with this architecture pattern.” These aren’t urgent, and they’re often not important to the business either. They’re interesting to engineers.

Middle management frequently enables this. A developer expresses interest in Technology X, and the dev manager allows it because saying no is uncomfortable. Before you know it, 20% of capacity is spent on technical exploration that doesn’t connect to any objective.

Eisenhower’s “Eliminate” quadrant should catch this, but it doesn’t, because nobody frames their pet project as “Not Important.” The matrix requires honesty that political organisations don’t provide.

This is where frameworks like BRICE earn their keep. Business Importance forces the question: does this advance our strategic priorities, or is it internally interesting but externally irrelevant? A Rust rewrite might score highly on developer satisfaction but poorly on Business Importance, making the trade-off visible.

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RGT: Eisenhower’s Practical Replacement

If you want the insight Eisenhower provides—“are we firefighting or building for the future?"—without the framework’s weaknesses, use Run/Grow/Transform tagging.

RGT tags every objective explicitly. You can instantly see your portfolio breakdown: 30% Run, 50% Grow, 20% Transform. That’s the conversation boards actually want—and it’s quantified, not vibes-based.

In RoadmapOne, RGT tagging is built in. Tag your objectives, and the analytics show the split in real time. No need to maintain a separate Eisenhower matrix or argue about which quadrant something belongs in.

When Eisenhower Is Your Best Tool

Despite everything above, there are scenarios where Eisenhower vocabulary earns its place:

Crisis triage. When everything is genuinely on fire—major outage, security breach, regulatory emergency—the Urgent+Important vs Important-but-Not-Urgent distinction helps teams quickly sort “fix now” from “fix properly later.” This isn’t strategic prioritisation; it’s emergency management.

Stakeholder education. When executives confuse urgency with importance (demanding immediate action on non-critical requests), the Eisenhower vocabulary provides neutral language to push back. “That’s urgent but not important—let’s schedule it for next quarter” is easier to say than “your request doesn’t matter.”

Personal time management. For individual PMs managing their own workload (not the product backlog), Eisenhower works well. “Should I answer this email or write the strategy document?” is exactly the question the matrix was designed to answer.

Practical Implementation

If you want to use Eisenhower-style thinking without the framework’s weaknesses:

Use RGT tagging instead of quadrants. Tag every objective as Run, Grow, or Transform. Review the portfolio balance quarterly. Adjust if you’re over-indexed on Run (firefighting) or under-indexed on Transform (future bets).

Define urgency criteria explicitly. Real urgency means: regulatory deadline, security vulnerability, competitive window that closes, or revenue at immediate risk. Everything else is “important but not urgent” regardless of who’s asking.

Audit the “Not Important” work. Look at where capacity actually goes. If 20% is spent on internal tooling, technical exploration, or pet projects that don’t connect to objectives, that’s your Eliminate quadrant—even if nobody labelled it that way.

Connect to prioritisation frameworks. Use RICE , BRICE , or ICE to score objectives. Those frameworks quantify importance and let you rank rather than categorise.

The Bottom Line

The Eisenhower Matrix is vocabulary, not methodology. It gives you language to discuss whether your roadmap is balanced between firefighting and strategy, but it doesn’t help you prioritise within those categories.

For boards and executives, speak Eisenhower. They know the language. When they ask “are we too focused on urgent work?"—answer with RGT tags and portfolio breakdowns.

For actual prioritisation, use a quantitative framework. RICE, BRICE, ICE, or one of the other approaches we support in RoadmapOne. Those frameworks define criteria, produce scores, and let you rank objectives rather than just categorise them.

The Eisenhower insight is real: teams spend too much time on Urgent and not enough on Important. But the matrix is the wrong tool for fixing it. Tag your roadmap, quantify your priorities, and let the data show whether you’re building for the future or just fighting fires.

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References

• Run/Grow/Transform Framework — RoadmapOne’s article on portfolio balance tagging
• BRICE Prioritisation — Quantitative prioritisation with strategic alignment
• Capacity-Based Planning — Why WIP limits connect to urgency
• Objective Prioritisation Frameworks — Complete guide to all 17+ frameworks
• Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Popularised the Eisenhower Matrix for personal productivity