For the prioritized list, we gather top 10 lists from each customer facing team, so for example the User Ops list will have things that help with ticket volume and the Solutions Sales list will have things that unlock new sales.

At the same time, the company leadership gets together to determine our business strategy — which objectives will be most important in the next year? We often thing about this as a portfolio approach — eg. X% on Eng Velocity and Y% on tackling a certain type of market opportunity. We make these decisions by looking at data, discussing what we’ve learned over the year, debating what we think will have the biggest impact, running exercises where we each get to allocate a hypothetical $100, etc.

Then, we combine the top 10 lists applying our business strategy: first by doing a weighted average where the weights are determined by which impact is most important strategically. Finally we do a manual adjustment round where the business leaders discuss reasons why certain items might have ended up too high or too low.