The Illusion of "High Priority"
Every product roadmap suffers from the same delusion: everything is marked "high priority." When asked to rank features, stakeholders label 8 out of 10 items as "must-have" or "P0." Sales insists every customer request is critical. Leadership wants all strategic initiatives completed simultaneously.
The result is predictable burnout. Teams context-switch between too many initiatives, completing nothing well. Engineers work weekends trying to deliver on impossible commitments. Projects drag on for quarters because nobody agreed upfront what could wait.
Traditional prioritization fails because it asks "What should we do?" When everything feels important, teams try to do everything—just slower, with lower quality, and with increasing resentment as the backlog grows faster than delivery velocity.
The truth: if everything is important, nothing is. The only way to create focus is subtraction. Not addition. Not ranking. Deletion. This tool forces teams to cut scope by making them choose exactly 3 items to kill. You cannot proceed until you delete something. The constraint is the point—it surfaces what you're actually willing to sacrifice.
Reverse Prioritization: Ask What to Kill, Not What to Keep
Most prioritization tools ask "What's most important?" This produces lists where everything clusters at "high" or "critical." Reverse prioritization flips the question: "What are we willing to kill?"
Traditional Prioritization
- ✗Asks "What should we do?"
- ✗Produces inflated priority scores
- ✗Teams try to do everything slowly
- ✗Scope continuously expands
Reverse Prioritization
- ✓Asks "What should we kill?"
- ✓Forces explicit cuts before proceeding
- ✓Teams focus on fewer things well
- ✓Scope deliberately contracts
This tool reveals truth. When forced to cut exactly 3 items from their roadmap, teams quickly identify what they're secretly willing to drop—the features they've been carrying out of politeness, the initiatives nobody truly believes will succeed, the technical debt that can actually wait another quarter.
If everyone cuts the same 3 items, you have consensus. If cuts are scattered, you have fundamental disagreement about strategy that needs discussion. Either way, you learn what you're willing to sacrifice—information that traditional prioritization never surfaces.
When to Force Descoping
Backlog Grooming
When your backlog has 100+ items and nothing gets closed, force the team to cut 10 items. Repeat until the backlog is manageable. The items nobody's willing to cut are your true priorities.
Emergency Triage
When unexpected incidents or customer escalations demand immediate resources, run reverse prioritization on planned work. See what the team agrees to pause to make room for urgent fixes.
Resource Crunch
When a key team member leaves or you lose budget, you can't deliver everything planned. Force cuts immediately rather than letting the team slowly fail at 10 things instead of succeeding at 7.
Quarterly Planning
Start Q planning by listing last quarter's priorities, then force cuts for items that didn't ship. If nobody wants to cut them, they roll forward. If everyone cuts them, they're officially dead—no guilt, no "maybe later."
Scope Creep Prevention
When stakeholders request adding features mid-sprint, list the new request plus existing work and force them to cut 3 items. Adding new scope requires explicitly killing existing commitments.
Focus Recovery
When the team feels scattered across too many projects, run reverse prioritization weekly. Cut 3 things every week until you're down to the initiatives people actually believe will move the business forward.
Ready to Cut Scope?
Add your items, force the team to cut 3, and see what everyone agrees to drop.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you manage scope creep?
Effective scope creep management requires forced subtraction, not just prioritization. When new requests arise, use reverse prioritization: list existing commitments plus new requests, then force stakeholders to cut 3 items. Adding scope requires explicitly killing existing work. This makes trade-offs visible and prevents the "yes to everything" pattern that causes scope creep. Run this exercise whenever someone wants to add features mid-project or when the roadmap feels overloaded.
What is reverse prioritization?
Reverse prioritization asks "What should we kill?" instead of "What should we do?" Traditional prioritization produces lists where everything is "high priority." Reverse prioritization forces teams to explicitly delete items before proceeding. This reveals what people are actually willing to sacrifice—information that scoring systems never surface. The constraint (you must cut exactly 3 items) is intentional: it forces hard choices rather than allowing teams to keep everything at lower velocity.
What are free tools for backlog cleaning?
Backlog cleaning tools should force deletion, not just reorganization. Options include reverse prioritization tools (like this one), backlog bankruptcy (archiving everything and rebuilding from scratch), or time-based expiration (auto-close items older than 6 months). The key is making deletion the default rather than requiring justification for every cut. If your backlog has 100+ items and nothing closes, you need forced deletion, not better categorization.
Why must I cut exactly 3 items?
The "exactly 3" constraint forces intentionality. If you could cut 0 items, everyone would—that's why backlogs grow indefinitely. If the number varied, people would game it by cutting 1 trivial item. Exactly 3 items creates enough pain to be meaningful but not so much that people refuse to engage. It's a Goldilocks number for forcing real choices about what to sacrifice.
What if everyone cuts different items?
Scattered cuts reveal strategic misalignment. If sales cuts technical debt while engineering cuts customer features, you have fundamental disagreement about what matters. This isn't a problem with the tool—it's valuable information. The scattered results force a conversation about strategy before you waste months on work that stakeholders don't actually support. Use the disagreement as a starting point for alignment discussions, not as a reason to keep everything.
Can I run this multiple times to keep cutting?
Yes. If your backlog has 50 items, run reverse prioritization repeatedly until you're down to a manageable list. Each round forces 3 cuts. After 5 rounds, you've deleted 15 items and the remaining 35 are what the team genuinely cares about. This iterative descoping works better than asking "Which 15 of 50 should we cut?"—the smaller forced choices are psychologically easier while producing the same outcome.
Do I need to create an account?
No. The descoping tool is completely free and requires no signup. Add your items, share the link with your team, have everyone cut 3 items, and view results showing what people agree to drop. Sessions are temporary and disposable—use it for roadmap planning, backlog grooming, or emergency triage without any friction.