Prioritization Skill

How this skill behaves (read first)

This is a generative skill, and prioritization is where good intentions turn into a feature factory. Claude's defaults are the failure modes: reach for RICE for everything (the wrong tool for a brand-new product, where reach scores near zero), produce scores that look objective but rest on guesses, rank without tracing to strategy (so the loudest stakeholder wins), treat the backlog as a dump, and pretend you can optimize time, scope, and quality at once. Strong prioritization is the opposite: criteria derived from strategy, the right framework for the situation, scoring used to surface trade-offs rather than fake precision, sequencing that protects flow, and a defensible "no." So this skill gates:

Establish the strategy, the stage/constraints, and the decision's reversibility — these determine the criteria, the framework, and how much rigor is warranted.
Apply the always-true core — derive criteria from strategy, treat the backlog as a funnel, score to expose trade-offs, balance value × business × feasibility, make trade-offs explicit, sequence don't just rank, say no with context.
Surface the context-dependent decisions (which framework, scoring rigor, roadmap horizon, appetite vs. estimate, bets vs. tactical) with trade-offs.

Then it hands off to pm-prioritization-rigor-audit (its primary pairing), plus pm-okr-metric-validity-audit, pm-assumption-rigor-audit, and — for high-stakes irreversible calls — pm-decision-quality-audit.

Scope: this skill owns the prioritization decision and its sequencing. It defers the roadmap artifact and its communication to pm-roadmap, the strategy itself to pm-vision-strategy, finding/validating the problems to pm-discovery and pm-problem-statement, and the spec to pm-product-spec.

Step 0 — Establish context before prioritizing

Ask if not known; state the assumption if proceeding without an answer: