Most managers I know are drowning in work. Their teams are building features, fixing bugs, tackling tech debt, and somehow still falling behind.
I was the same way for years until I discovered something that changed how I think about prioritization completely.
You probably know the Pareto Principle. The classic 80/20 rule, where 20% of your work creates 80% of your results. It’s management 101. Everyone nods when you mention it. Few people actually use it.
But here’s what nobody tells you: you can stack Pareto on top of itself.
Take your 20% and apply the rule again. Now you’re at 4% of work, creating 64% of results. Go one more level. You end up at 1% of your total scope delivering 50% of your impact.
When I first heard this, I thought it was nonsense. Too good to be true. Just another productivity hack that sounds clever but falls apart in reality.
Then I tested it on my payments team.
The framework that changed everything
Let me walk you through how this actually works.
Level 1: Standard Pareto (20% → 80%)
Our payments platform had a massive backlog. Payment acceptance, invoice generation, recurring billing, payment methods management, analytics dashboards, fraud detection, refund workflows, webhook integrations… the list went on.
If we looked at everything we could possibly build, accepting payments, generating invoices, and creating basic reports represented roughly 20% of the feature space. But those three would deliver 80% of what customers needed.
This is where most teams stop. It’s already a huge improvement over trying to do everything. But we can go deeper.
Level 2: Pareto² (4% → 64%)
Within those three core features, which ones actually move the needle? Payment acceptance was non-negotiable. Without it, we have no product. Invoice generation came next because businesses need receipts for their accounting systems.
Those two features? About 4% of our entire potential scope. Yet they unlocked 64% of customer value.
Reports and dashboards are nice. They help with decision making. But you can run a business without them for a while. You can’t run a business without accepting money or giving customers receipts.
Level 3: Pareto³ (1% → 50%)
Here’s where it gets brutal. If I could only ship ONE thing, what would it be?
Payment acceptance. Full stop.
That single capability represented maybe 1% of everything on our product roadmap. But it created 50% of the value we needed to deliver. Think about it. Without payment acceptance, you can’t invoice anyone. You can’t generate reports on transactions that never happened. Nothing else matters.
That’s your 1%.
Why does nobody do this
I’ve shared this framework with dozens of engineering managers. Most of them get excited. Then they go back to their teams and... nothing changes. Here’s why.
The pressure to show progress everywhere
Product wants to see movement on their features. Sales promised specific capabilities to customers. Your CEO asks about five different initiatives in every 1:1.
It feels safer to make incremental progress on everything than to bet big on one thing.
But that’s exactly the trap. When you spread your team thin, everything moves slowly. Nothing ships at quality. Engineers get frustrated because they’re context-switching constantly. Six months later, you have fifteen half-finished features instead of three complete ones.
The fear of being wrong
What if you pick the wrong 1%? What if you focus everything on payment acceptance, and it turns out customers actually needed the reporting dashboard first? This is real. I’ve been wrong before. But here’s what I learned: being wrong while moving fast is better than being right while moving slow.
If you ship your 1% in three weeks and it’s not quite right, you learn that fast and can pivot. If you spend three months building fifteen things in parallel and they’re all wrong, you’ve wasted way more time.
The interesting work problem
Engineers want to work on interesting problems. Payment acceptance can be boring. Everyone wants to build an AI-powered fraud detection system or a real-time analytics engine. I get it. I’m a technologist at heart. Cool tech is fun.
But impact matters more than being interesting. And frankly, when you ship something that genuinely moves the needle for users, that’s incredibly satisfying even if the technology isn’t cutting-edge.
When do I actually use this?
This isn’t a daily standup exercise. It’s a strategic tool for big moments.
I use it when starting new projects that have an unclear scope. The kind where everyone has ideas and the backlog explodes to fifty items within the first planning session.
I use it when taking over a team that’s been spinning its wheels. Teams often lose sight of what they’re actually trying to accomplish. This exercise brings clarity fast.
I use it when breaking down massive epics. You know the ones. “Improve the checkout flow”, or “Build analytics platform” or “Modernize the infrastructure.” These need to be decomposed, and this framework gives you a lens for doing it.
The key is: this helps you define success metrics that actually matter. Once you know your 1%, you know what to measure. You know what “done” looks like. You know what trade-offs to make when reality gets messy.
The hard truth about using this
Here’s what nobody tells you about this framework. You need to keep reminding yourself of what you defined. It’s so easy to lose sight of your 1% after two weeks of daily firefighting.
I document it in our team’s Notion workspace. Or Confluence. Wherever the team actually looks. And we reference it constantly when making decisions.
Because here’s what happens if you don’t: scope creep. Someone suggests a “small addition” that’s actually not small. It seems harmless. Before you know it, your 1% has become 5% and you’re back to building everything at once.
The other thing people get wrong: they think this means ignore everything except the 1%. No. The 20% matters. The other 80% matters. Everything on your roadmap probably has some value.
But this exercise forces you to be honest about where the real impact lives. And that honesty shapes your metrics, your resource allocation, your trade-off decisions.
When a product asks for a new feature, you can say: “That’s interesting, but our 1% is X. Does this support X? If not, let’s put it in the backlog for after we nail X.”
When an engineer wants to gold-plate something, you can say: “That’s a 20% optimization on a 4% feature. Let’s ship the 1% first.”
It’s not about doing less work. It’s about having a framework to decide what matters most.
The bigger picture
I’ve been managing engineering teams for around a decade now. I’ve tried every prioritization framework out there. MoSCoW, RICE scoring, weighted shortest job first, value versus complexity matrices... all of it. This three-level Pareto approach is the simplest and most effective thing I’ve found.
Why? Because it forces you to confront an uncomfortable truth: most of what we build doesn’t matter that much. That sounds harsh. But it’s also liberating.
If 1% of your work creates 50% of your impact, that means you can ignore a LOT of noise. You can say no to most things. You can focus intensely on a tiny surface area.
And when you do that, you move fast. You ship quality. Your team feels the momentum. Morale improves because people see their work actually landing and making a difference.
Start with your next big thing
You don’t need to reorganize your entire company around this framework.
Just try it on your next big initiative. Next project kickoff. Next time you’re trying to figure out what success looks like. Sit down with your team. List everything you could build. Then ask:
“Which single thing, if we nailed it, would make this project successful?” That’s probably your 1%.
“What’s the minimum viable set around that?” That’s your 4%.
“What’s the complete vision?” That’s your 20%.
Write it down. Put it somewhere visible. Reference it constantly. Let it guide your metrics and trade-offs. The industry is tough right now. Budgets are tight. Teams are lean. Everyone’s trying to do more with less. The teams that win won’t be the ones working hardest. They’ll be the ones working on the right things.
Find your 1%. Everything else flows from there.
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Share this with another engineering manager who might need it.
It reminds me of the Critical Chain/ToC idea of subordinating to the constraint. In this case “constraint = most valuable piece”.
And it reminds me of a piece I wrote on ranking value - same idea, probably easier to get for people that are not as comfortable with numbers: https://theintentionalmanager.substack.com/p/the-discipline-of-value?r=5bq0ac&utm_medium=ios
Great piece. Some product people out there need to read it :)
But not only, I sometimes need to stop myself from saying - "these are our top-3 priorities for the week".