Objective Prioritisation: Manual
Executive Override and Political Triage—When Simple Beats Scientific
This is one of RoadmapOne’s articles on Objective Prioritisation frameworks .
Every product team has faced this moment: you’ve scored 80 objectives using RICE, debated WSJF dimensions for six hours, and generated a beautifully quantified roadmap. Then the CEO walks into the room and says, “That’s all very interesting, but we’re doing X first because I know the market and these numbers don’t.” Welcome to Manual prioritisation—the framework for when frameworks become theatre, when strategic intuition trumps algorithmic scoring, and when political reality demands executive override.
Manual prioritisation is brutally simple: assign each objective a priority from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) based on stakeholder judgment, strategic alignment, or leadership direction. No formulas, no dimension multiplication, no pretence of quantitative rigour. Just human judgment translated into a rank order. It sounds like giving up on process. In reality, it’s acknowledging that many prioritisation decisions are fundamentally political, contextual, or intuitive—and pretending otherwise wastes time.
TL;DR: Manual prioritisation is the escape hatch when RICE/ICE/WSJF create more confusion than clarity. It works for political environments where frameworks are ignored anyway, for strategic pivots that no algorithm can capture, and for executive triage when speed matters more than consensus. But Manual prioritisation sacrifices transparency, invites favouritism, and only works if leadership’s judgment is actually trustworthy.
The Single Dimension of Manual Prioritisation
Unlike RICE’s four dimensions or WSJF’s complex Cost of Delay calculations, Manual prioritisation has one input: Priority, scored 1-10. The score aggregates everything—impact, effort, urgency, strategic fit, political necessity—into a single subjective judgment. High scores mean “we must do this now.” Low scores mean “this waits or dies.” The simplicity is the point.
Priority: Everything Compressed into One Number
A Priority 10 is the most important objective on the roadmap—typically driven by existential urgency (regulatory deadline, contract commitment), CEO directive, or board-mandated strategic pivot. A Priority 1 is backlog noise—ideas that haven’t been explicitly killed but will never get resources. Most work clusters in the 4-7 range, where the strategic case is credible but not overwhelming.
The challenge with Manual prioritisation is that the single number hides the reasoning. When you see a RICE score of 1,250, you can decompose it: high reach, moderate impact, strong confidence, reasonable effort. When you see a Manual priority of 8, you don’t know if that’s driven by business value, political necessity, or the fact that the CEO’s nephew suggested it at dinner. The lack of transparency is Manual’s core weakness.
The advantage is speed and decisiveness. Scoring 50 objectives manually takes 20 minutes, not 2 hours. Leadership says “this is an 8, that’s a 5, that’s a 2,” and the roadmap is sequenced. No debates about whether Reach is 6,000 or 8,000 users. No arguments over Fibonacci scales. Just “here’s what matters, here’s the order, go build.”
When Subjectivity Is Honesty, Not Weakness
Manual prioritisation admits what algorithmic frameworks obscure: many decisions are fundamentally subjective. You can’t RICE-score a strategic pivot based on a founder’s market intuition. You can’t WSJF-score “we need to rebuild trust after the PR disaster” because trust isn’t in the Fibonacci scale. You can’t ICE-score “the board demanded this” because boards don’t care about your confidence levels.
In these scenarios, wrapping subjective judgment in algorithmic clothing is dishonest. Teams spend hours estimating reach and impact to produce a RICE score that justifies the decision leadership already made. The RICE process becomes political theatre—legitimising predetermined conclusions with fake quantification. Manual prioritisation is more honest: “Leadership believes this is Priority 9 because of strategic context you may not have visibility into. We’re doing it.”
That honesty has costs. It requires stakeholders to trust leadership’s judgment without algorithmic validation. It invites accusations of favouritism when unpopular objectives score high. And it only works if leadership’s strategic intuition is actually reliable—if the CEO who overrides your RICE scores delivers consistently correct market reads, Manual works. If the CEO’s “gut feelings” are wrong more often than RICE would be, Manual becomes organised chaos.
Manual Prioritisation in Action
Consider a SaaS company with five objectives:
Objective A: Rebuild search functionality (estimated 4 months) Manual Priority: 6 Rationale: Important for user experience, but not urgent. Current search is slow but functional. This scores high on impact but lacks urgency.
Objective B: GDPR compliance for EU expansion (estimated 2 months) Manual Priority: 10 Rationale: Non-negotiable for Q3 EU launch. Contractual and regulatory requirement. No RICE algorithm needed—this is existential.
Objective C: CEO’s vision for AI-powered recommendations (estimated 6 months) Manual Priority: 9 Rationale: Low confidence (unproven in domain), high effort, uncertain impact—RICE would score it 200. But CEO has strong conviction based on industry trend reading and board alignment. Manual priority reflects strategic bet that algorithms would kill.
Objective D: Performance optimisation reducing server costs (estimated 1 month) Manual Priority: 4 Rationale: Clear ROI, low effort—RICE would score this 800+. But it’s not strategically differentiating, and engineering would rather build features than optimise infrastructure. Manual priority reflects that it’s “nice to have, not strategic.”
Objective E: Mobile app dark mode (estimated 3 weeks) Manual Priority: 3 Rationale: Highly requested, easy to build—ICE would score this high. But leadership views it as cosmetic polish that distracts from core value delivery. Manual priority reflects strategic dismissal despite user demand.
Sort by Manual priority, and you get: B (10), C (9), A (6), D (4), E (3). This roadmap is transparently driven by compliance necessity (B), strategic conviction (C), and deprioritised despite algorithmic logic (D, E). The Manual scores make the power structure visible: leadership judgment dominates quantitative optimization.
This is Manual prioritisation’s brutal clarity. It doesn’t pretend decisions are data-driven when they’re actually political or intuitive. It acknowledges that sometimes the CEO’s market read is more valuable than your impact estimates. And it lets you move fast when consensus is impossible.
When Manual Prioritisation Is Your Best Weapon
Manual prioritisation excels in four contexts. First, political environments where frameworks are ignored anyway. If leadership habitually overrides RICE scores, stop wasting time on RICE. Switch to Manual, make the power structure explicit, and focus energy on execution rather than justification theatre.
Second, strategic pivots that algorithms can’t capture. When market conditions shift violently, competitive threats emerge, or the board mandates a new direction, frameworks based on last quarter’s data become irrelevant. Manual prioritisation lets leadership recalibrate the roadmap instantly based on strategic context that hasn’t yet generated measurable data.
Third, startup chaos where speed trumps process. Pre-product-market-fit companies pivoting weekly don’t have time for WSJF workshops. The founder says “we’re betting on this hypothesis now,” assigns it Priority 10, and the team ships. Manual prioritisation is low-ceremony prioritisation for high-velocity environments.
Fourth, executive triage during crises. When the system is down, a major customer is threatening to churn, or a PR disaster is unfolding, no one wants a RICE scoring session. Leadership assigns priorities based on urgency and damage control, the team executes, and retrospectives happen after the crisis passes.
When Manual Prioritisation Betrays You
Manual prioritisation collapses in three scenarios. First, when leadership judgment is unreliable. If the CEO’s strategic intuition is consistently wrong—betting on features customers don’t want, dismissing optimizations that would save millions—Manual prioritisation amplifies that dysfunction. At least RICE or ICE provide data-driven counterweight to bad judgment. Manual removes all guard rails.
Second, when transparency and team buy-in matter. Junior team members who don’t understand the strategic context see Manual priorities as arbitrary favouritism. Why does the CEO’s pet project get Priority 9 while their well-researched proposal gets Priority 3? Without algorithmic justification, morale craters. Manual works when teams trust leadership implicitly; it fails when that trust is fragile.
Third, when you’re trying to build a data-driven culture. Manual prioritisation sends the message that judgment beats data, intuition beats analysis, and politics beats metrics. If you’re trying to transition from HiPPO decision-making to evidence-based product management, Manual prioritisation is a step backward. Use it sparingly, or risk signalling that the transformation was theatre.
Practical Implementation
Start by gathering leadership—CEO, CPO, CTO, and anyone with roadmap veto power. List your backlog objectives (top 30-50) and go through them rapidly. For each, leadership assigns a Priority 1-10 based on strategic importance, urgency, political necessity, or intuition. Debate is allowed but timebox it: 2 minutes per objective maximum.
Enforce a forced distribution to prevent everyone clustering at 7-8. Mandate that scores spread across the range: 10% get 9-10, 20% get 7-8, 40% get 4-6, 30% get 1-3. This prevents priority inflation and forces acknowledgment that most work is medium priority, not “critical.”
Document the rationale for high-priority scores. “Priority 10: GDPR compliance—regulatory requirement for EU expansion” provides context. “Priority 9: CEO strategic bet on AI recommendations—unproven but board-aligned” makes the judgment call explicit. Documented rationale prevents future confusion about why decisions were made.
Sort by Manual priority, draw the capacity line, and fund what’s above it. Generate your Manual priority report in RoadmapOne alongside tag distributions. The Manual ranking shows leadership’s judgment. The tag heatmap shows whether that judgment creates a balanced portfolio. If all Priority 9-10 objectives are “Run” work and zero “Transform,” leadership is optimising for short-term safety, not long-term survival. Make that visible and debate it.
Re-score quarterly or when strategic context shifts. Manual priorities age poorly—what felt urgent last month might be obsolete this month. Continuous re-scoring keeps the roadmap aligned with current leadership judgment, not stale intuition.
Manual Prioritisation and Organisational Honesty
Manual prioritisation is the framework for when frameworks become obstacles. Use it when you need decisions now, when strategic context defies quantification, or when leadership’s judgment is more trustworthy than your team’s collective estimates. It’s low-ceremony, fast, and unapologetically subjective.
But Manual only works if leadership owns the subjectivity. Don’t dress up Manual scores as data-driven. Don’t pretend the CEO’s Priority 9 assignment was the result of rigorous analysis when it was gut instinct. The honesty is the feature. Manual prioritisation says: “We’re making judgment calls based on context, experience, and strategic intuition. We’re accountable for those calls. Let’s move.”
RoadmapOne makes Manual prioritisation visible and trackable even when it’s subjective. Assign priorities, sort by score, and fund what leadership believes matters most. Then track outcomes: did Priority 10 objectives deliver what leadership expected? Did Priority 3 objectives turn out to be secretly critical? Retrospectives turn intuition into learning, and learning calibrates future judgment.
Manual prioritisation isn’t the goal—it’s the escape valve. Mature teams use algorithmic frameworks (RICE, ICE, WSJF) for most decisions and Manual for strategic overrides, crisis triage, and political realities. The key is transparency: when you Manual-prioritise, own it. Explain why. And prove over time that leadership’s judgment deserves the trust you’re asking for.
Sometimes the CEO’s market intuition is worth more than your RICE score. Manual prioritisation is how you act on that reality without pretending it’s data-driven. Use it wisely, own the subjectivity, and earn the trust that makes it work.
For more on Objective Prioritisation frameworks, see our comprehensive guide .