Example: Cutting Eleven Growth Initiatives Down to Three
An industrial equipment manufacturer had eleven active growth initiatives competing for the same stretched team, and none of them were fully resourced. Prioritizing three and killing the rest freed up the capacity to actually finish something.
An industrial equipment manufacturer had eleven active growth initiatives on its roadmap and a leadership team that could accurately name the resourcing problem but had never been able to agree on which ones to cut.
Background
The company manufactures specialized equipment for industrial and agricultural customers, and had spent the prior two years pursuing an aggressive growth agenda: new product lines, geographic expansion, a direct-to-customer sales channel alongside its traditional distributor network, and several smaller efficiency initiatives layered on top. Each had been approved individually, at different points, by a leadership team trying to be responsive to real opportunities. None had ever been evaluated against what the others were also asking of the same finite engineering and sales capacity.
Eleven priorities is not a strategy
By the time we were engaged, the company had eleven initiatives formally on its roadmap, all nominally active, all competing for attention from the same group of maybe fifteen people who could meaningfully move any of them forward. The natural result was that all eleven were progressing slowly, none was fully resourced, and the quarterly planning meeting had become a recurring negotiation over which fire to fight first rather than a genuine strategic conversation.
Building criteria the leadership team could actually apply
Rather than starting with a debate about which specific initiatives to keep, we worked with the leadership team to first agree on the criteria an initiative needed to meet to justify real resourcing: a credible path to a specific revenue or margin outcome within eighteen months, a named owner with actual bandwidth to drive it, and no dependency on a resource already fully committed elsewhere. Only after the criteria were agreed, and agreed to apply evenly, did we run every one of the eleven initiatives through them.
What got killed, and why that was the hard part
Three initiatives met the bar clearly. The other eight did not, and killing eight initiatives that leadership team members had personally championed at various points was, predictably, the hardest part of the engagement, harder than building the criteria themselves. Having pre-agreed, explicit criteria mattered here specifically because it let each decision get made against a standard the room had already accepted, rather than becoming a fresh negotiation, and often a personal one, for each individual initiative.
Results
Eighteen months later, the company had three active growth initiatives instead of eleven, each fully resourced with a named owner, and had shipped a new product line that had been stalled in development for over a year under the old spread-too-thin structure. The quarterly planning meeting now functions as a review of progress against three specific bets, not a renegotiation of which fire to fight next.
Questions
FAQ
How does a leadership team end up running eleven initiatives at once?
Almost always one addition at a time, the same way the approval-chain problem accumulates elsewhere. A new initiative gets approved because it sounds reasonable in isolation and nobody wants to be the person who says no to a plausible growth idea, and none of the earlier initiatives ever formally gets killed to make room. Eighteen months later, the same small team that could realistically resource three or four efforts is nominally responsible for eleven, and every one of them is moving slower than it should.
Why is having eleven priorities worse than having none at all?
A company with no stated priorities at least makes resourcing decisions honestly, based on whatever is loudest that week. A company with eleven stated priorities creates the appearance of a plan while actually resourcing nothing properly, since the same finite engineering and sales capacity gets split eleven ways. Everyone can point to the plan and say their project is on it, which makes the underlying resourcing problem harder to see and harder to fix.
What made killing the eight lower-priority initiatives the hardest part of the process?
Each of the eight had a sponsor on the leadership team who had championed it publicly at some point, and killing an initiative can read as a personal rebuke to whoever championed it, even when the real issue is capacity, not merit. Building explicit, pre-agreed kill-or-fund criteria before looking at any specific initiative let the team make the calls against a standard everyone had already accepted, rather than negotiating each one individually in the room.
Facing something similar?
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