How product, development, and marketing leaders can regain focus on what really transforms their company
“Did you know that 80% of a leader’s time goes on tasks that don’t generate strategic impact?”
If you feel like you’re putting out fires all day, but key results aren’t being reflected… you’re probably stuck in the cycle of the urgent.
🧭 The Key Difference: Urgent vs. Important.
- Urgent: Demands immediate attention. It’s usually tied to crises, mistakes, or external pressure.
Example: “The contact form broke and no leads are coming in.” - Important: Has long-term impact. Strengthens the product, brand, team or business.
Example: “Restructure the permission system to scale to new countries.”
🔎 Urgent reacts. The important transforms.
🚨 Why Is It Serious to Live Alone in Urgency?
When everything becomes urgent, the organization goes into survival mode. And that has visible and invisible consequences:
❌ Loss of quality.
Urgent tasks are rarely planned well. They are solved “as can be”, with no time to think about scalability, testing or documentation.
🔧 “We implemented that module because you needed it already… but now it generates bugs that we don’t know how to solve.”
⏳ Delaying strategic projects.
Every urgent outage steals time from important projects that were already underway: performance improvements, redesigns, new campaigns or A/B testing.
🎯 “The onboarding redesign was paused because we had to resolve 3 unplanned requests this week.”
🧠 Team fatigue and demotivation.
A team that lives putting out fires doesn’t feel pride in what it builds. It only feels exhaustion.
💬 “We feel we don’t move forward, we only react. The backlog grows, but no one looks at it.”
📉 The Urgent Has an Invisible Cost.
📌 Unplanned urgencies = quick decisions = more mistakes.
📌 More errors = more corrections = less real progress.
📌 Less progress = frustration and lack of visible results.
📌 Frustration = loss of key talent.
👉 What looks like short-term productivity is actually an attrition trap.
⚠️ Key Examples in Product and Marketing Teams.
🧨 “Urgent” new functionality outside the roadmap.
A business leader requests a new feature that “needs to be released now”… but was never discussed in previous meetings.
Now the sprint is interrupted, the solution is improvised and technical debt is accumulated.
🔍 Impact: Quality is neglected, undocumented complexity is accumulated, the original roadmap is delayed.
📄 Lack of documentation creates artificial urgencies.
“Who knows how this gets uploaded to the QA environment?”
The person in charge is gone. No one documented. Team goes into chaos to solve blindly.
🔍 Impact: Valuable time is lost, improvisation occurs, and the stability of the environment is compromised.
🧪 Poorly executed UAT = urgency in production.
Final testing was superficial. Uploaded to production without validating all the real cases. Now the team gets tickets from annoying users, and must hot fix.
🔍 Impact: Low customer confidence, saturates the technical team and wastes time in rework.
⏰ Campaigns that were not ready, but become urgent due to lack of follow-up.
A landing page has been in draft form for weeks, but the client activates it at the last minute. Everything becomes “for now”.
🔍Impact: bad design, copy errors, legal risk, loss of brand reputation.
🔧 How to get out of the Circle of Fire?
The solution is not in working faster, but in leading with more intention. Here are key tools and practices:
If something is Urgent and Important✅, you do it, today. If it is Important✅ but Not Urgente🗓️, agendize it and protect it as a priority. When it is something Urgent🔁, but Not Important, it is best to delegate it. And if it is neither Urgent❌ nor Important❌, just delete it or ignore it without guilt.
🎯 Effective leadership seeks to operate more and more on the important, not urgent, reducing urgencies through planning, vision and processes.
🛠️ Tools for Real Change
- Rigorous sprint grooming: do not improvise tasks between weeks.
- Backlog with impact criteria, not only urgency criteria.
- Serious testing and validation protocols (QA, UAT, staging)
- Accessible and living documentation (Confluence, Notion, GitBook)
- Protected schedules for strategic projects
- Responsible triage and escalation policy
🧠 Conclusion: Urgency is not the problem, lack of management is.
It’s not about eliminating emergencies (some are unavoidable),
but about designing a culture and system where urgencies are not the norm.
When you lead from impact, not reaction, your team delivers better,
your team delivers better, moves forward with clarity and builds with purpose.
📍 Next Step?
- Audit your week: how much did you do for urgency vs. strategy?
- Rank what you did according to the Eisenhower matrix.
- Identify:
- Which urgencies were avoidable?
- Which important tasks were displaced?
- What patterns are repeated in your team?
