How good are you at estimating value?

Most teams make suboptimal prioritization/value decisions every day because they are forced to make those decisions under:
• Conditions of scarcity (not enough time, money, or people)
• Conditions of stress (customers want their requests handled right now and delivered yesterday)
• Conditions of uncertainty (imperfect information about their current state and future state)

These poor decisions adversely affect their ability to effectively, efficiently, and predictably deliver value to their customers. While teams will not be able to change these conditions, they can learn to make better decisions by embracing them.

We will explore these topics using the 1999 NFL draft as a backdrop. In that year, Mike Ditka famously was overconfident in his ability to estimate player value and disastrously bet the farm on one pick. We will explore the options Mike Ditka had (and every team has) in the NFL draft as well as prioritization options we have on a daily basis. We will expose some flaws in the commonly used prioritization methods (By Value, CD3, WSJF etc.). We will also propose a mode of working that helps with effective prioritization under conditions of scarcity, stress and uncertainty.