There's a poster that used to hang in Facebook's offices, created by their legendary Analog Research Laboratory, that has stayed in my mind since I saw an article about it.
"It is only prioritization when it hurts."
I think about that quote constantly. It's one of the truest things anyone has ever said about product management.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Prioritization
We pretend prioritization is a rational process. We have frameworks: RICE scores, weighted decision matrices, impact vs. effort grids, customer interview tallies, revenue projections, ROI. We gather in conference rooms with whiteboards full of sticky notes. We dot-vote. We stack-rank. We build elaborate spreadsheets with mathematical precision. And then we convince ourselves we've "prioritized" when we've really just organized our wishlist and called the top items "P0."
Real prioritization isn't choosing what to build. Real prioritization is choosing what NOT to build.
Facebook's Analog Research Laboratory: Where Truth Lives on Posters
Before we go further, let me tell you about the place that created this perfect distillation of product truth.
Facebook has always embraced artwork as part of its culture. Back in 2005, when the company was still in its Palo Alto headquarters, they hired graffiti artist David Choe to paint murals on their walls. Choe was offered $60,000 in cash or the same amount in Facebook stock. He wisely chose stock and eventually made $200 million when Facebook went public.
In 2010, two Facebook employees—Ben Barry and Everett Katigbak—took over an unused warehouse space in Facebook's Palo Alto building. They didn't ask permission. They didn't write a proposal. They didn't allocate a budget. They just started making posters.
Barry had screen printing experience. Katigbak had a letterpress background. Both wanted to create something tactile and permanent in the middle of a company building ephemeral digital products. They scavenged equipment, sometimes bought supplies with their own money, and started printing.
The posters said things like:
- "Move Fast and Break Things"
- "Stay Focused and Keep Shipping"
- "What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?"
- "Done is Better Than Perfect"
These weren't corporate communications department messaging. These were hand-crafted, screen-printed artifacts that captured the actual culture of a company trying to figure out what it was building.
The Lab's Role in Shaping Facebook Culture
What started as a guerrilla art project became integral to Facebook's identity. Barry became known internally as the "Minister of Propaganda". The executive team loved what they were creating and officially institutionalized the lab as its own department.
The lab's primary mission evolved into something bigger than decoration: to reinforce Facebook's values and spark conversations within the workplace. As the company grew from 500 million to billions of users, the Analog Lab became the physical manifestation of company culture across all global offices.
The support from leadership became so strong that no new Facebook office opens without work from the Analog Research Lab. The posters define Facebook spaces. As current design lead Scott Boms explains: "It entirely changes how you feel when you walk into a Facebook space and speaks to the core values of the company."
The lab moved to Facebook's new Menlo Park campus in 2013, where hand-painted signage from New Bohemia Signs marked its new home. Today, the Analog Research Lab has 10 locations around the world with over 20 full-time employees.
From Propaganda to Participation
But the lab's role extended beyond producing artwork for walls. It became a creative studio accessible to all Facebook employees. Rather than just making posters for people, Barry and Katigbak invited employees to come make posters themselves, offering classes and workshops to teach the printmaking process.
This became one of Facebook's most popular team activities, with the lab hosting demos every week. Employees could learn screen printing, letterpress, illustration, and other hands-on creative skills—a deliberately slow, analog counterpoint to their digital work.
In 2016, the lab expanded this mission with a Designer-in-Residence program, bringing in outside artists to create provocative work that challenged employees to think differently. Artists like Luiza Dale, who printed Facebook's entire terms of service agreement on sheets employees could take home, or Elana Schlenker, who created the "Slow Down Your Hurry Up" poster during Facebook's controversies.
The posters are printed in batches of up to 100 copies, each one screen-printed by hand. They're deliberately analog in a digital world, slow in a fast company.
Scott Boms, who leads the lab today, describes the mission: "to create inspiring and thought-provoking projects about the world and our place in it." He calls himself a "workplace philosopher," listening to conversations across the company and translating them into visual interventions in the physical spaces people inhabit.
The posters aren't motivational—Boms actively runs away from that characterization. They're provocative. They ask questions. They create friction. They're meant to open minds to new ideas and perspectives, to spark dialogue, to make people uncomfortable when necessary.
Like: "It is only prioritization when it hurts."
When Prioritization Actually Hurts
Let me tell you what real prioritization feels like:
It hurts when you kill a feature your best engineer is passionate about because it serves too few users, even though the engineering is elegant and the engineer will be disappointed.
It hurts when you say no to an executive stakeholder's pet project because it doesn't align with strategy, even though saying no to executives has career consequences.
It hurts when you deprioritize something users explicitly requested because its a one off, idiosyncratic to one account of many.
It hurts when you choose between two genuinely good ideas knowing that only one can ship this quarter, and the other might never happen.
It hurts when you decide to fix technical debt instead of shipping new features knowing that users won't see the value and your growth metrics will suffer.
It hurts when you cut scope to ship on time and the product feels incomplete, even though incomplete and shipped beats perfect and delayed.
That's prioritization. And it should hurt every time.
The Warning Sign: When It Doesn't Hurt
If your prioritization decisions feel easy and obvious, you're doing it wrong. Here's why:
You're Not Making Trade-Offs
Real prioritization requires sacrifice. If you're "prioritizing" without killing anything, you're just making a to-do list.
"We'll build all of these, just in different orders" is not prioritization. It's sequencing.
True prioritization sounds like: "We're building A instead of B, and B will never happen." That's when it starts to hurt.
You're Not Saying No to Good Ideas
The easy part is saying no to bad ideas. Everyone agrees those shouldn't ship.
The hard part is saying no to good ideas. Ideas that would help users. Ideas that would generate revenue. Ideas that smart people believe in.
If you're only killing obviously bad ideas, you're not prioritizing. You're just filtering.
You're Avoiding Conflict
When prioritization is working, people are upset:
- Engineers who wanted to build the thing you cut
- Designers who spent weeks on concepts you're not pursuing
- Sales who promised features you're not delivering
- Executives whose strategic vision you're de-scoping
If everyone's happy with your prioritization decisions, you're probably not making real choices.
What Prioritization Looks Like When It Hurts (Real Examples)
Let me give you scenarios from my career where prioritization actually hurt:
The Perfect vs. The Good Enough
At InCharge, we could have spent six months building a comprehensive maintenance tracking system with every feature any operator might need.
Or we could spend two months building basic service call tracking that covered 80% of use cases.
We chose the latter. Shipped faster. Got feedback. Iterated.
But it hurt telling stakeholders: "We're not building the perfect version. We're building the shippable version, and it will be incomplete." On the plus side, we didn't build features that failed in the wild, and we got a ton of feature ideas once the v1 went live.
Killing the White Whale Feature
Every product has that one feature that's been "on the roadmap" forever. The white whale. The thing everyone wants but nobody's built.
At one company, it was advanced reporting and analytics. Customers asked for it constantly. Sales needed it to close deals. It would differentiate us from competitors.
And every quarter, I prioritized other work. Infrastructure improvements. Core functionality fixes. Features that served more users.
The advanced analytics kept getting pushed. For years.
That hurt. Disappointing customers hurts. Telling sales "not this quarter, again" hurts. Watching the team get excited about finally building it, then cutting it again, hurts.
But the alternative was spending six months on a feature that 5% of users would use while neglecting features that 95% needed.
The Analog Lab Philosophy Applied to Product
The Analog Research Lab's approach to making posters teaches something about prioritization:
They print in small batches. Not infinite runs. Limited quantities. This forces choices about what to print next.
They use hand processes. Screen printing is slow. Letterpress is labor-intensive. This forces prioritization by physical constraints.
They focus on the meaningful. Not every message becomes a poster. Only the ones worth the slow, deliberate process of making something permanent.
They embrace imperfection. Hand-crafted means imperfect. But each piece is unique, tactile, real.
In product management, we should think the same way:
Limited resources force prioritization. You can't build everything. The constraint is the point.
Slow, deliberate decisions beat fast, reactive ones. Prioritization shouldn't be a snap judgment in a meeting. It should hurt enough that you think carefully.
Focus on what's meaningful. Not everything deserves to be built, just like not everything deserves to be a hand-printed poster.
Ship imperfect things. Done and real beats perfect and theoretical.
How to Know If You're Actually Prioritizing
Here's my test:
Are you regularly telling people no? If not, you're not prioritizing.
Are those people upset? If not, you're only killing bad ideas, not making hard choices.
Do you feel the weight of opportunity cost? If not, you don't understand what you're sacrificing.
Are you shipping? If not, you're over-prioritizing and under-delivering.
Does it hurt? If not, it's not actually prioritization.
The Posters That Tell the Truth
The Analog Research Lab has produced hundreds of posters over the years, creating a unique visual history of Facebook between 2010 and 2018. Many have become famous within tech culture:
- "Done is Better Than Perfect" (ship imperfect things)
- "Move Fast and Break Things" (later changed to "Move Fast with Stable Infrastructure" as Facebook matured)
- "What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?" (take risks)
- "Be the Nerd" (created in 2016 to encourage engineers to embrace being nerds)
- "Slow Down Your Hurry Up" (designed in 2016 by artist-in-residence Elana Schlenker to encourage reflection during Facebook's controversies)
- "Black Lives Matter" (stark social justice statement)
The lab has also created installations beyond posters, like artist Joseph Alessio's laser-cut mirror piece that shows the word "friend" from one angle and "enemy" from another, with your own reflection visible in both.
But my favorite remains: "It is only prioritization when it hurts" because it's the one that nobody wants to hear but everyone needs to internalize.
Conclusion: Embrace the Pain
If your prioritization decisions feel easy, you're probably:
- Not making real trade-offs
- Not saying no to good ideas
- Not disappointing anyone
- Not actually prioritizing
Real prioritization means:
- Killing good ideas to ship great ones
- Telling passionate people their projects aren't happening
- Disappointing stakeholders with legitimate needs
- Choosing between equally valuable options
- Living with opportunity cost
It should hurt. The pain is the signal that you're doing it right.
So the next time you're in a prioritization meeting and someone suggests adding "just one more thing" to the roadmap, remember that poster from Facebook's Analog Research Laboratory:
"It is only prioritization when it hurts."
Want to see more of the Analog Research Lab's work? Check out their Type Directors Club exhibition or read about the history of the lab on Ben Barry's site. Inc. Magazine has a great profile of Scott Boms and the lab's provocative approach, and Room has an in-depth look at how the lab shaped Facebook's culture. You can also watch Scott Boms introduce the TDC exhibition to understand the philosophy behind the work. And next time you're prioritizing, ask yourself: does this hurt enough?