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Should You Prioritize Tasks as a Team? A Run-or-Skip Decision Guide

Run a team prioritization session to agree on drop items, focus effort, and accelerate delivery. Join Ideoreto to share your work.

7 min readSeptember 30, 2026

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In this guide

Why team prioritization exists at all When running a team prioritization session makes sense When you can skip it What a team prioritization session actually involves The step most teams underestimate: agreeing what can be dropped Adapting the session for remote and small teams Common failure modes to avoid How this connects to the rest of your project setup The decision, summarized

Why team prioritization exists at all

Every team eventually faces the same wall: a long list of tasks, limited time, and no shared agreement about what matters most.

The question is not whether prioritization is useful.

It is whether the team should do it together, in a structured session, or let individuals sort their own work.

This guide helps you decide when a group prioritization session is worth running, when to skip it, and how to run one well if you choose to.

Looking at a laundry list of everything on a team's plate can feel overwhelming.

That is the problem a team prioritization session solves.

Atlassian documents a play for this exact situation, designed to help a team agree on priorities and define where it is okay to delay or drop tasks Atlassian Team Playbook.

The documented goals are specific.

The play helps a team prioritize the right tasks and execute them in the right order to eliminate bottlenecks.

It also empowers the team to say no to low-priority work that could delay the project Atlassian Team Playbook.

Without a shared reference point for decisions, Atlassian notes, a team will just end up thrashing about.

People work on what looks urgent to them individually.

Dependencies get missed.

Someone spends a week polishing something nobody needed while a blocking task sits untouched.

When running a team prioritization session makes sense

Run a session together when most of these conditions are true:

Multiple people will touch the same tasks, so order matters across the team, not just within one person's day.
Some tasks depend on others, and getting the order wrong creates rework or waiting.
The team disagrees, or would disagree, about what counts as important.
Stakeholders keep adding requests mid-project, and the team needs a documented basis for saying no.
Shared understanding or velocity is already a concern for the team.

That last point comes directly from Atlassian's guidance: if you are struggling with shared understanding or velocity, running this play might help .

What a team prioritization session actually involves

Atlassian's documented play gives a concrete picture of the commitment.

It involves three to twelve people, about fifteen minutes of preparation, and roughly sixty minutes of session time.

Preparation matters.

Everyone should read the project poster or one-pager, plus the team's OKRs or whatever goal-setting framework you use, before the meeting.

This ensures everyone understands the success criteria before ranking anything Atlassian Team Playbook.

The session itself follows five documented steps:

Brain-dump project tasks. As a group, list every task needed to deliver on the project's goals, one per index card. Be ruthless about including only this project's work, not business as usual. Atlassian suggests boiling it down to fifty tasks or less so the list stays manageable Atlassian Team Playbook.

Categorize the tasks. Group them into two to five categories, for example by milestone, by team responsible, or by bug fix versus new feature. Note dependency relationships on the back of each card, such as which tasks depend on which Atlassian Team Playbook.

Prioritize in small groups. Break into small groups, assign each one category, and rank its cards quickly. Then swap categories and review how the other group ranked the same tasks, adjusting as needed. Atlassian's tip: do not rank a task low-priority if many other tasks depend on it Atlassian Team Playbook.

Draw the okay-to-drop line. Agree on criteria for what can fall below the line, then go category by category deciding which tasks could drop or fail without sinking the whole project. Document those criteria so you can reuse them when evaluating incoming requests later Atlassian Team Playbook.

Review and reflect. Ask the group to thumb-vote on whether they feel the team can deliver on time. If the room is overwhelmingly pessimistic, spend the remaining minutes listing the risks to success. Atlassian suggests following up with a premortem in that case Atlassian Team Playbook.