Every organization says prioritization is difficult, but the reality is that prioritization usually isn't the problem. Alignment is.
During a recent portfolio workshop, we introduced Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) as part of a broader conversation about portfolio management. By the end of the session, it had become one of the most talked-about parts of the workshop. Not because WSJF was complicated. In fact, the framework itself was relatively easy to understand.
The challenge was what happened when we asked a group of leaders to actually use it together. That's where things got interesting.
Everyone Can Learn WSJF
If you’re an Agile practitioner, you’ve probably heard of Weighted Shortest Job First, or WSJF. At its core, WSJF provides a structured way to compare competing work by balancing the value of an initiative against the effort required to deliver it. The concept isn't particularly difficult, but applying it at the portfolio level is a different story.
When you're prioritizing across multiple business units, products, teams, and stakeholders, every initiative feels important. And when each initiative has an owner with their own goals, budget, and team, it's easy to look at prioritization through a very specific lens: What's most important for my team?
That's why we didn't start by putting a list of initiatives on a screen and asking everyone to rank them. Instead, we started with learning.
First, we used a SAFe City simulation, which brings the major concepts of SAFe including WSJF to life, to teach the concepts in a setting that wasn't tied to anyone's actual work. That gave participants a chance to understand the nuances of WSJF without getting caught up in defending their own initiatives.
Then, we held a small-group round-robin where each initiative owner explained their work to the owners of competing initiatives. That step turned out to be just as important as the calculation itself. People could ask questions, initiative owners had to explain the problem they were solving and the value they expected to create, and participants started to see work outside of their own area through a much broader lens.
By the time we began prioritizing the real portfolio, the group had more context, and that started to change the conversation.
The Questions That Changed the Conversation
As participants worked through the prioritization exercise, some of the questions we heard were revealing.
"Is this just for the work my team is doing?"
"What if I just fund my own team to do this?"
"If I don't need the resource-constrained internal team, is the effort basically zero?"
These questions highlighted a bigger issue than how to calculate WSJF. They showed how easily portfolio decisions can become siloed.
Initiative owners were naturally thinking about the authority, budget, and resources they controlled. If work required another team, it could feel like someone else's problem. If an owner could fund their own team to do the work, it was tempting to think of that work as essentially "free."
But that's not how portfolio value works. An initiative doesn't become more valuable because you can find a separate budget for it. And effort doesn't become zero simply because the resources sit outside the team that's doing the prioritization.
The goal isn't to keep every team busy. The goal is to make sure the organization is spending its capacity on the most valuable work. That required us to keep bringing the conversation back to outcomes. Instead of "What does my team need to do?" the question became: "What is the organization trying to accomplish, and how can we work together to make that happen?"
This was a major unlock for the group.
Three Portfolio-Level “Aha!” Moments
By the end of the exercise, the group had surfaced three important realizations:
1. We don't actually know enough yet.
As the group dug into competing initiatives, they realized that several weren't ready to be prioritized at all. The value propositions weren't clear enough, the problem wasn't well understood, and there wasn't enough information to confidently compare one initiative against another.
In fact, several initiatives moved backward in the Kanban—from Analyzing to In Review. That might sound like a step backward, but in reality the group had discovered that you can't make a meaningful prioritization decision if you haven't done the work to understand the initiative in the first place. WSJF didn't magically give them the answer. It exposed where they needed to learn more. That's one of the most valuable things a prioritization framework can do.
2. We should behave like one portfolio team.
The second realization was even bigger. Participants began to recognize that they had been approaching the portfolio as a collection of individual teams, each trying to move its own work forward. What about my epics? and How do I keep my team busy? were questions we heard. But what if the most valuable thing for the organization requires your team to support someone else's initiative?
Wouldn't you want to work together as one team if that was the most important work to get done?
That shift—from protecting individual work to supporting the most valuable outcome—was a major “Aha!” moment for the group. The portfolio doesn't exist to keep every team equally busy. It exists to help the organization make the best use of its capacity.
3. What actually needs to be managed at this level?
The third realization was about governance.
Not every piece of work needs portfolio-level visibility. Some initiatives were relatively small in effort but potentially significant in impact. The group had to think about whether those belonged at the portfolio level or could be managed closer to the work, perhaps at the ART level. At the same time, some initiatives were simply too large to treat as a single portfolio item.
A five-year ERP implementation, for example, can't realistically be treated as one giant initiative and prioritized once. There needs to be a way to break the work down so leaders can understand what they're actually choosing to fund and why. In other words, prioritization isn't just about deciding what comes first. It's also about deciding what belongs in the conversation in the first place.
WSJF Is More Than a Calculation
That's what made this workshop so valuable. The WSJF framework gave the group a common language, but the real learning came from using it together. They learned where they didn't have enough information. They challenged their assumptions about effort and funding. They started thinking beyond their own teams. And they began asking better questions about governance and decision-making.
That's also why the way you teach WSJF matters. An interactive experience gives people the opportunity to discover what the formula reveals about their organization. And when people have the opportunity to work through those questions together—with the right context, facilitation, and space to challenge their assumptions—the conversation becomes much bigger than prioritization. It becomes a conversation about how the organization decides what matters.