Prioritizing at the Expansion Stage

All senior management teams, and especially CEOs, at expansion stage software companies have one thing in common: at any given point in time, there is way more to do than there is capacity to do it, and new items are popping up constantly.

Prioritizing issues and tasks is a key aspect of an expansion stage manager’s job.

Earlier this week I was having dinner with a number of current and former expansion stage CEOs, including Ratmir Timashev, CEO of Veeam Software, a leader in VMWare backup and VMWare monitoring software.

The question of how a CEO prioritizes everything that flows his or her way came up. Ratmir said, “There is a 2×2 matrix I use. One axis is Importance and the other is Urgency. I focus on the upper left hand box, Urgent and Important, and ignore all else.”

Another CEO immediately responded, “That’s what General Eisenhower used during WWII and as President of the United States!”

I then received a Wikipedia entry about it the next day. The matrix that’s core to the method looks like this:

This is a great way to think about one’s activities, whether for a President of the United States or the CEO of an expansion stage software company.