Priority Poker: The Only Planning Game That's Honest About Office Politics

Your teams play planning poker to estimate work. They use story mapping to visualize backlogs. You've got MoSCoW prioritization frameworks and weighted scoring models and impact/effort matrices that make everyone feel like they're making data-driven decisions.

But here's what's actually happening in your prioritization meetings: the person with the loudest voice, the biggest title, or the most political leverage gets their pet features prioritized, while actually important work gets shoved to the bottom of your backlog because it doesn't have a powerful enough sponsor.

Welcome to the real game everyone's playing. It's the only prioritization method that's honest about what really drives product decisions in most organizations. And unlike all those other frameworks, this approach acknowledges the brutal truth: in office politics, the house always wins.

Let me explain how this game actually works, because your teams are already playing it whether they realize it or not.

Any feature request that came directly from the CEO automatically gets four aces, regardless of customer need, technical feasibility, or business impact. This is the royal flush of product prioritization, and it trumps everything else on the table.

Sales comes to the table claiming they'll close massive deals if you just build this one feature. They're usually bluffing (they have no idea what customers actually want) but they bet aggressively and most product teams fold rather than call their bluff.

Your tech teams have pocket rockets (two aces) in the form of "technical debt" and "architectural concerns." They can play this hand to kill any feature they don't want to build, regardless of business value. It's almost impossible to beat because nobody else understands the technical details well enough to call BS.

Support has real customer pain data, which should be a winning hand. But they're terrible at poker and usually fold to anyone with a bigger title or louder voice. Their legitimate customer needs end up in the muck while vanity features get built.

Your product managers have actual user research, market data, and business metrics. In a rational world, this would be a winning hand. In the political game, it's barely enough to stay at the table. Everyone nods politely at the data and then does what they were going to do anyway.

Your teams try every prioritization method in the book, and they all fail for the same reason: they pretend politics don't exist.

Your story mapping sessions turn into political theater where the loudest voices arrange sticky notes to support their pre-determined conclusions. The quiet data that contradicts the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) gets conveniently placed in the "future considerations" column.

Your impact/effort matrices become exercises in creative scoring where somehow the CEO's pet project always ends up in the "high impact, low effort" quadrant, even when everyone knows it's actually "questionable impact, massive effort."

Your weighted scoring models are just elaborate ways to reverse-engineer the scores to match the priorities that were already decided in closed-door meetings. Teams spend hours debating the difference between a 7 and an 8 while pretending the outcome isn't predetermined.

Your RICE frameworks (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) sound scientific until you realize that every component is subjective and gets gamed by whoever has the most influence in the room. Suddenly every executive's priority has maximum reach and impact with complete confidence.

These frameworks fail because they assume everyone is acting in good faith with shared objectives. But in the real world, different stakeholders have different incentives, different success metrics, and different political agendas.

Here are the hands that actually win in this game:

"Our biggest competitor just launched this feature" is an unbeatable hand. It doesn't matter if the feature is stupid, if customers want it, or if it fits your product strategy. Competitive panic trumps rational decision-making every time.

Any feature that can be shown to investors gets priority, regardless of whether real customers will ever use it. Demo-driven development is a powerful hand because it has clear political upside for executives.

When your biggest customer asks for something, that request carries more weight than a hundred small customers asking for the same thing. Revenue concentration gives certain customer voices disproportionate political power.

Legal and compliance requirements are like pocket aces: they beat almost everything because the downside of ignoring them is existential. Nobody argues with the lawyers, even when their interpretation is overly conservative.

Features that can be built fast and shown off quickly often beat more important but slower work. In this system, optics matter more than outcomes, and visible progress beats meaningful progress.

Since you're going to play whether you want to or not, you might as well learn how to win. Here are the strategies that actually work in the real world of office politics:

What does the CEO get measured on? What makes the VP of Sales look good? What keeps the CTO up at night? Once you understand everyone's personal game, you can frame priorities in terms of their winning hands.

You don't need everyone to agree with priorities. You need the right people to agree. Figure out who has the most political capital and get them on your side. Two executives trump twenty engineers in the political arena.

When the CEO's pet project inevitably gets prioritized over carefully researched roadmaps, don't fight it. Have a "fine, but here's what we're not doing" conversation. Make the trade-offs explicit and put them on record.

This isn't won in a single hand. It's won over time by consistently delivering results and building credibility. Every successful project gives you more chips to bet with in future rounds.

Don't expect data to win arguments, but use it to support decisions that were made for political reasons. Give people the rational justification they need for choices they're making for emotional or political reasons.

Want to really shake things up? Try this: the next time you're in a prioritization meeting, call out the real game everyone's playing.

"Before we start scoring these features, let's be honest about what's actually going to determine our priorities. [CEO's name], which of these did you specifically ask for? Sales, which ones are you claiming will close deals? Engineering, which ones do you want to kill for technical reasons?"

Put all the political cards on the table before you start pretending to evaluate business value. It'll be uncomfortable as hell, but at least everyone will know what game they're actually playing.

Before any prioritization meeting, identify:

Watch for tells that reveal the real priorities:

Build the CEO's pet feature, but do it in a way that also addresses real user needs. Use political capital from delivering on mandates to fund work that actually matters.

Package important improvements inside politically popular projects. "While we're building the investor demo feature, we'll also fix the underlying performance issues."

Find executives who benefit from your priorities and let them sponsor the work. User experience improvements become "the CRO's conversion optimization initiative."

Deliver on political priorities quickly and visibly to build credibility for future battles. Every successful delivery gives you more chips to bet with.

This isn't about winning every hand. It's about building the credibility and political capital to influence the game over time.

Deliver on what you commit to, especially the politically important stuff. Credibility is the only currency that matters in the political game.

Learn what really drives revenue, what keeps executives up at night, and what the board actually cares about. Political decisions make more sense when you understand the underlying pressures.

You can't fight every bad decision. Choose battles based on user impact, business impact, and your ability to actually win.

Politics is about relationships. Invest in understanding and helping other stakeholders achieve their goals. Political capital is built through mutual benefit.

Here's the uncomfortable reality: great products aren't usually built by perfect prioritization frameworks. They're built by product managers who understand the political landscape, work within the constraints of organizational power dynamics, and find ways to sneak important work into the roadmap between the politically mandated features.

You can't eliminate office politics from product development. Politics is just another word for how decisions get made when people disagree. But you can stop pretending it doesn't exist and start playing with your eyes open.

This isn't about giving up on good product decisions. It's about being realistic about how those decisions actually get made, and finding ways to influence the outcome in favor of better results.

The alternative to acknowledging politics isn't pure rational decision-making. It's being completely ineffective because you're fighting a game you refuse to understand.

So the next time someone suggests using another "objective" prioritization framework, just smile and deal the cards. At least this approach is honest about what you're really doing.

The house always wins, but that doesn't mean you can't walk away from the table with something valuable.