I was asked what to do when the customer won’t prioritize the stories and insists that everything has to be done now. That brought back memories of the first time that had happened to me. This was a very long time ago and I can’t remember who had given me the idea to approach it this way.
We had enough story cards for several iterations, leading up to a specific production release. The customer was adamant that every single story was critical and that there was no way for him to prioritize them. I explained that we could only do one iteration’s worth at a time but he wouldn’t pick which stories should be in the first iteration. Everything was priority one.
So I scooped up all the story cards into one stack and put them in front of the customer. I said “We’re doing to implement the stories one at a time in the order they’re in the stack. If you want to reorder the stack to put more important things first then this is your chance.”
I pointed out again that the stack was pretty much in a random order and let him think about that. After a long pause he replied “You’re not really going to implement them in this order are you? You’re going to do the more critical ones first.”
“Not at all” I said. “We can’t prioritize them. Only you can do that.”
At that point he finally realized I was serious and almost in a panic started sorting the cards into two piles. It turned out that he truly only cared about half a dozen of the stories which had to be first. After that, it didn’t matter what order they were done in.
The lesson I took out of this is that he was expecting that we would step in and do the prioritization for him if he refused to do it. It was only when it became blindingly obvious that we wouldn’t, that he accepted the responsibility himself.
In the process, it also became apparent that although he’d said everything was top priority, there were really two levels of priority - things that truly were critical for him and things that weren’t.