Defining “Urgent” So Your Team Stops Guessing

The P0-P4 framework that prevents chaos and keeps product teams focused on what matters most.

As your team grows, it’s common for each person to have a different understanding of what is implied by the words “urgent” or “high priority,” leading to costly mistakes for your product and customers. At each company, I find myself re-defining these terms during crises, so I’m sharing my definitions now so you can borrow or adapt the list and skip this step and get back to building amazing world changing products.

P0

P0 tasks require immediate attention.

• If you're not at work, you need to come in.

• If you're already at work, you should not leave until it's resolved.

• If it's the middle of the night, you must wake up to address it.

This is the highest severity level and it should be reserved for complete outages of critical production systems, situations where the software poses a severe risk to human life, a hack from an outside party, or other infrequent but high-impact events that can sink a business or destroy a customer relationship. Use this designation sparingly.

Examples:

1. A major bug is discovered in an AI-powered medical diagnosis system, and it is actively leading to misdiagnoses and patient harm.

2. An autonomous vehicle fleet management product experiences a partial outage rendering the vehicle sensors incapable of preventing an accident.

3. Hackers have gained access to your internal IT systems and are actively siphoning your IP offshore..

P1

A P1 is your top priority during normal business hours.

• Nothing else should take precedence during this time

• You don't need to go out of your way or interrupt your personal life to address this challenge.

• It is still very high priority and should be your ultimate focus, with any other items considered a distraction.

Examples:

1. A critical bug is identified in the machine learning model used for fraud detection, leading to a surge in missed detections and the costs are stacking up.

2. The virtual reality training platform experiences significant performance issues, preventing employees from completing mandatory safety training sessions, which within 36 hours will require a stop work order.

3. Search performance is degraded severely and users cannot do their work.

P2

P2s are tasks that need to be done in a timely manner but are not hair on fire. They necessarily come after P0 or P1 tasks, and the person assigned the task should determine where it fits within their schedule, within a reasonable timeframe of say a few hours to a few days at the latest.

Examples:

1. Implementing new features and enhancements to an AI-powered chatbot to incorporate a forthcoming change in rules that is imminent but not yet live.

2. Conducting performance optimization on a big data analytics platform to reduce processing time and enhance insights generation accuracy.

3. Developing additional security measures for a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to protect sensitive data given a known, and low probability exploit.

P3

This is something we would like to accomplish, but there's no particular urgency surrounding it. However, it’s not “someday/maybe” either.

Examples:

1. Data shows that there are some non-intuitive steps in our onboarding flow, but it’s not causing drop off or attrition, but it’s not a great look for us.

2. When users authenticate through social logins, the words displayed on the head of the box are the system names for the services, not the user-facing names.

3. We’ve changed the routing on our support tickets, but the existing system has a fallback that the team can access, but it’s a little clunky.

P4

We don't want to forget this item exists, and it would be nice to address it if possible. We're primarily tracking it so that if someone ever has a significant amount of free time, they can tackle it.

Examples:

1. The Spanish language translation of our product is using Spain Spanish but half of our users live in South America.

2. We need to update the copyright date on our website.

3. We’ve learned that there’s a good third party plugin that might save us some time, and someone ought to investigate it.

Implementation

I've never encountered team issues arising from disagreements over P3 vs P4, but teams lacking clarity between P0, P1, and P2 often face significant difficulties in a time of true need. The task creators feel that others aren't taking these issues seriously, and the task implementers believe they are proceeding based on agreed upon priorities, leading to communication breakdowns and customers left hanging.

Please feel free to use these definitions, borrow them, paste them into your own company handbook, or reference them here. You can even create your own, but don't attempt to scale your company without a clear understanding of the level of urgency required for different types of crises situations.