Show me a backlog where two thirds of the tickets are marked high priority and I'll show you a team that makes its real decisions in Slack at 9am, based on who complained loudest yesterday.

This is rarely a discipline problem. The priority field gets filled in by whoever writes the ticket, at the moment they write it, and nobody types "medium" next to their own request. So the field drifts upward until it stops carrying any information, and the team quietly falls back on a different system: whatever the founder mentioned this morning.

What I install instead is small. Three tiers, defined by consequence rather than by how strongly someone feels. Tier one is what we are working on now, and it has a hard cap: no more items than the team can actually carry. Tier two is next, and it's ordered. Tier three is everything else, and I'd rather call that "not now" than "later", because later is a promise nobody has to keep.

The cap does most of the work. When tier one is full, adding something means taking something out, in the open, with a reason. That conversation is uncomfortable the first two times. After that it becomes the normal way your team says no, and people stop needing you to say it for them.

I don't bring a textbook model to this. RICE and MoSCoW are fine and I've used both, but a scoring sheet nobody maintains helps less than three tiers everybody understands.