Founder-Review Priority Test
Prioritize work you can proudly connect to a better customer outcome
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 96%
Evaluate prospective work by imagining a concise end-of-month review with the founder or CEO. For each task, ask what you spent time on, how it improved the customer's life, and whether you are proud to present the result. Work that cannot support a credible answer is likely low priority, poorly scoped, or disconnected from outcomes. Use the test before committing time, not merely as a retrospective storytelling exercise. It creates accountability without requiring the founder to review everything and shifts prioritization away from activity volume. The framework is especially useful when every request appears urgent but only a few materially affect customers or the business.
Origin
Kieran Flanagan described this recurring prioritization test on Marketing Against The Grain while discussing Airbnb's principle of shipping work people are proud of.
Core principles
- 01Important work should improve the customer's life
- 02Accountability clarifies weak priorities
- 03Outputs matter less than defensible outcomes
- 04Pride can reveal whether effort was well allocated
- 05A simple review question can discipline daily choices
How to run it
- 1
List candidate work
Write down the meaningful tasks or projects competing for the next planning period.
Pro tip Include recurring work that normally escapes explicit prioritization.
Watch out Do not evaluate only novel or visible projects.
- 2
Connect each item to customers
State specifically how completing each item should improve a customer's life or experience.
Pro tip Name the customer behavior or condition expected to change.
Watch out Avoid vague claims such as increasing value or driving impact.
- 3
Simulate the review
Imagine explaining the work and its customer result directly to the founder or CEO at month end.
Pro tip Keep the explanation short enough to expose weak logic.
Watch out Do not rely on effort or complexity as proof of importance.
- 4
Choose defensible priorities
Favor work with the strongest credible link to meaningful customer outcomes and remove or rescope the rest.
Pro tip Preserve essential maintenance through a separate risk-based lane.
Watch out Visibility to executives is not itself customer value.
- 5
Review evidence
At the end of the period, compare the promised customer benefit with the result and update future choices.
Pro tip Use misses to improve prioritization rather than manufacture a success story.
Watch out Do not rewrite the original rationale after seeing the outcome.
In the wild
A marketer must choose between polishing an executive dashboard and fixing an onboarding email sequence that repeatedly confuses new users. In a simulated founder review, the dashboard offers little customer benefit, while the onboarding repair has a clear path to faster activation.
→ The marketer prioritizes the onboarding work and can later report a concrete customer improvement.
Common mistakes
Optimizing for executive theater
The goal is not to select whatever impresses the founder; it is to expose whether work creates a defensible customer outcome.
Using effort as the outcome
Hours spent and tasks completed do not explain how the customer's life became better.
Ignoring essential invisible work
Security, maintenance, and compliance may need a parallel risk-based justification when direct customer impact is not visible.
Is it for you?
Best for
Knowledge workers and teams choosing among many plausible activities with limited time.
Not ideal for
Mandatory compliance, maintenance, or risk-control work whose value is preventing an invisible failure.
From the transcript
“if you were asked to stand up in front of the founder or the CEO at the end of the month and present to them…”
“And how did it make the customer's life better? Are you proud of the work that you did?”
“That's a pretty good litmus test for me of like, are you working on the right stuff?”
From the episode
Airbnb Just Copied Apple’s Product Development Strategy... Here’s Why (#138)