Planning is hard and messy, and it’s important to be ok with that. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we do it at 


A stack rank like this takes about a month, and we do it three times a year: for Q1, Q2, and H2. Each team creates write-ups of their projects in Atlassian, and then we weigh and prioritize them here. Everything above the black line is a must-have, and below it is a nice-to-have. The nice-to-haves sometimes get done, but from a leadership perspective, I’m really committed to prioritizing the must-haves. If we say we need to do something, we’d better do it.

A lot of this is directional. If you can quantify it you absolutely should, but not all impact is quantifiable and sometimes we prioritize things that don't have high impact. For example, tax compliance isn't a particularly high-impact activity, but we have to do it.


This is how much development work a project will take, ranked 1-5 (5 being the most difficult). Our max effort is 14 points per quarter.


2 = must-have
1.5 = New Buyer CVR or Revenue
1 = standard project

If something is a must-have, it doesn't mean other things are not important. This is meant to call out if we only have time for a few things, what are the absolute most important things we need to do?

Continue = outcome met, can do more work
Rollover = outcome not met

A lot of times in business, it's tempting to just move on to the next thing. But I prefer to make sure we're really finished with the things we've already started. We've learned to be mindful of the things that need cleanup or continued iteration and proactively incorporate them into our stack rank, so that they don't slip through the cracks.

An initiative like checkout optimization might be a little broad, but in the past we found we were being too prescriptive. We were setting the goal and the list of projects the team should do to meet it. Now in our writeups, we set the goal and expected impact, and then the team gets to come up with the tactics. It’s more empowering and a lot more fun.

Noah Kagan

Planning is messy, and it’s important to be ok with that. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we prioritize quarterly initiatives at AppSumo.

Objectives and Priorities Stack Rank at AppSumo

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