A free tool from The Alinement Brief
The Priority & Owner Grid
Three priorities. One name on each. One sentence for what done looks like. Fill it in with your leadership team in a single sitting, then put it somewhere it stares back at you.
Before you start
Three, not thirteen.
Most owners don't have three priorities. They have thirteen. A list of thirteen priorities is really a list of zero, because when everything is urgent, your team chooses for you.
A priority is not a to-do. It is the one thing that, if you get it done this quarter, changes the trajectory of the business. Here is the test for whether something belongs on this page: if you did nothing else this quarter but these three things, would the year start to exceed expectations? If the answer is yes, you have your three. If you are not sure, you still have too many.
If you have already run the Alignment Snapshot, start from the ranked list it gave you. If you haven't, three priorities written on a whiteboard will do. The names come next, in column two.
This quarter's sheet
Fill in one row per priority.
| Priority | Owner | We'll know this is done when |
|---|---|---|
Column two is the hard one
One name. Not a department.
Not "sales and ops together." Not "the leadership team." One person, by name, accountable for the result. A priority with two owners has no owner, because the day it starts to slip, each of them assumes the other is taking care of it. Nobody is lying and nobody is lazy. The accountability just went out the door.
Be clear with your team about what an owner is, because this is where it usually breaks down. The owner is not the person who does all the work. The owner is the one person who answers for the outcome. They can pull in the whole team. They can delegate every task on it. But when someone asks "where are we on this one," everybody looks at one person for the answer.
Column three is the finish line
Finish the sentence together.
"Improve cash flow" is not a priority. It is vague, and vague leaves room for interpretation. "Get our 13-week cash forecast running and reviewed every Monday by the end of Q3" is something a person can own, because anyone can see whether it happened or it didn't.
So for each of your three, you and the owner should be able to finish this sentence out loud: "We'll know this is done when ______."
If the two of you can't finish that sentence together, you don't have a priority yet. You have a conversation you still need to have.
Where it lives
Not in a folder.
Put it on the wall, on the whiteboard, or on your desk. Somewhere it stares back at you every day. A page filed away is a page nobody argues with, and the whole value of this one is that it is visible enough to argue with.
Next comes the status. Once the three rows are filled in, the Priority Scoreboard is what keeps them from quietly dying. You can also browse every free tool.