Quarterly Priority
Definition
A quarterly priority is a discrete piece of work a team commits to finishing inside a thirteen-week quarter, with one named owner and an agreed definition of done. Most frameworks cap each team and each person at three to five. Scaling Up popularized calling them 'Rocks', after Stephen Covey's demonstration that the big rocks only fit in the jar if they go in first.
A quarterly priority is neither a metric target nor a task: it is a deliverable that will plainly be either finished or unfinished on the last day of the quarter. Ownership is singular — a priority owned by a department is owned by nobody — and scope is set so one person can carry it alongside their normal load. They are chosen at quarterly planning, reviewed weekly as on or off track, and closed at the quarter end whether or not they landed. Anything needing more than a quarter is broken up or reframed as a longer-horizon goal.
Volume is the usual failure: five per person across a team of nine is forty-five commitments, which is a backlog with a deadline. The subtler one is the priority marked on track for eleven weeks and missed in week thirteen, which happens when the weekly review asks for a status rather than for evidence of progress since the last review.
Example
Weak: 'improve onboarding.' Stronger: 'self-serve onboarding live for all new Starter accounts by 30 September — owner: Priya.' One team carried 14 priorities into Q2 and completed 6; capped at 7 the next quarter, it completed 6 again, with half the work in progress.
See also: goal tracking