Describe how you would prioritise a backlog of 200 items when every stakeholder insists their items are critical.

1. Establish the prioritisation criteria before touching the list, and get them agreed by the sponsor. Typically business value, effort, risk, and dependency.
2. Make value concrete. “Critical” loses its force once each item has to state which business objective it serves and what the quantified impact of not doing it would be.
3. Apply a structured technique so the conversation is about the framework rather than personalities — MoSCoW for release scoping, or a value-versus-effort matrix to surface quick wins.
4. Enforce a constraint that forces genuine trade-offs. A useful one is that Must-have items may not exceed roughly 60 percent of release capacity, which leaves contingency and makes people choose.
5. Run the prioritisation as a joint session with all stakeholders present rather than bilaterally. When people hear each other's justifications, the ranking becomes a shared decision instead of one they can dispute afterwards.
6. Record the outcome and the rationale, and re-run the exercise each release. Priority is a snapshot, not a permanent property.