How do you prioritise when a customer (or several customers) send many requests at once?

30-second answerSay your answer out loud first, then reveal.

Tie every request back to the agreed goals and success metrics, then prioritise by impact on those outcomes, urgency (blockers and production issues first), effort, and risk. Make the trade-offs visible: maintain a shared, prioritised backlog with the customer, agree priorities with the decision-maker rather than whoever shouts loudest, and say no or "not now" explicitly with reasons. Across multiple customers, align with your manager on account priorities and escalate conflicts early.

Practical framework

Priority	Type
P0	Production incident, security issue, blocker for an imminent milestone
P1	Directly moves the agreed success metric
P2	Improves adoption or user experience significantly
P3	Nice-to-have, edge cases, cosmetic

Techniques

Shared backlog (their Jira or a tracker) visible to stakeholders, reviewed weekly.
Ask "what problem does this solve?" for every request. It often reveals a simpler fix or a misunderstanding.
Batch small requests into planned releases instead of constant context switching.
Protect focus time for building, not just meetings.
Communicate trade-offs: "If we add X this week, Y moves to next week. Which matters more for the pilot?"

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How do you prioritise when a customer (or several customers) send many requests at once?

Practical framework

Techniques

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