When Everything Is a "Must-Have," Nothing Is—Prioritization for Real-World Teams | Aliu Adewale

Aliu Adewale: When Everything Is a "Must-Have," Nothing Is—Prioritization for Real-World Teams

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"Every yes to something unimportant is a no to what matters." - Aliu Adewale

Aliu's current challenge isn't from his day job—it's from a volunteer project for his local Parent-Teacher Association. The group wants to build a centralized app for school announcements, PTA updates, volunteer coordination, event reminders. The first meeting produced 250 ideas, all of them framed as must-haves, all of them needed before school resumes. The window: three months. Vasco names two traps that most Scrum Masters fall into. First, MoSCoW and similar frameworks aren't prioritization—they're categorization. The moment everything ends up in the "must" bucket, you're still stuck. Second, prioritizing a feature list assumes features are independent. They almost never are: a login blocks a dozen things downstream; front-end depends on back-end; dependencies decide the order more than desirability does. Aliu's experiment with the PTA group is a focusing constraint: stop asking "what do we need this year?" and start asking "what do we need in the first three months when school resumes?" The 50-item must-have list collapsed to five or six features. Vasco pushes it further with his own favorite question: "What's preventing us from releasing tomorrow?" That's the question that exposes what really matters—and it almost never returns a list of features.

Self-reflection Question: If your team had to release tomorrow, which of your "must-haves" would you actually need?

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About Aliu Adewale

Aliu is an Agile Delivery Lead with over 10 years of experience empowering teams to unlock their potential and deliver meaningful value. As an author, Aliu simplifies Agile principles through real-life experiences, providing practical insights for professionals to apply Agile methodologies effectively in work and everyday life.

You can link with Aliu Adewale on LinkedIn.

You can also find Aliu and his book on agileinplainsight.com.