How do you Prioritize Work?- Google Project Mgmt
Google Project Management Interview Question and Answers - How do you prioritize project work when multiple tasks conflict?
Core principles:
Value-first: Prioritize work that maximizes business value or removes the largest risk to value realization.
Time-sensitivity: Urgency matters — regulatory or contractual deadlines outrank lower-value work.
Least-regret decisions: Choose options that keep future choices open and avoid irreversible moves unless necessary.
Data-driven: Use capacity, lead-time, dependency and Cost-of-Delay (CoD) data rather than opinions.
Transparent trade-offs: Present stakeholders with clear impacts (cost/time/quality) and recommended options.
Protect the team: Minimize context-switching and enforce WIP limits so throughput remains healthy.
Step-by-step prioritization process
1) Rapidly triage — classify the conflict
Is it blocker (prevents progress on critical path), risk mitigation (prevents failure), value (high business value), regulatory/contractual, or nice-to-have?
Use a quick Power/Impact or Urgency/Importance check to classify.
2) Map dependencies & criticality
Which tasks are on the critical path? Which work unblocks others?
Visualize dependencies (dependency map or simple sequence diagram).
3) Quantify impact
Estimate business value, Cost of Delay (CoD), potential revenue/cost impact, customer impact, and risk exposure for each conflicting item.
Estimate effort/lead time to complete each item and resource needs.
4) Use a prioritization framework
Pick the right framework for context and apply it quickly:
WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) — value / job size. Great when multiple value-generating features compete.
MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) — for scope triage with fixed time.
RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) — useful for product-feature prioritization.
Cost of Delay / CoD per unit time — ideal when time-to-market matters.
Eisenhower (Urgent/Important) — rapid operational triage.
Contractual & Compliance First — if legal/regulatory deadlines are present, they typically get top priority.
