The Method
The method existed before the platform.
DEGAP — Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize. The published method from Managing Priorities, and what the platform builds on top of it.
Priorities.ai is guided by DEGAP — the prioritization method from Managing Priorities by Harry Max, co-founder of Priorities.ai. The method came first. The platform is its infrastructure.
Five moves, in order
Decide — to prioritize deliberately, instead of letting priorities happen to you.
Engage — the right people, before the decision. Not informed after. Not consulted when it’s too late to matter.
Gather — the inputs that judgment actually needs: the candidates, the criteria, the context, the constraints.
Arrange — the inputs into comparisons that are fair. Apples to apples, at the same altitude — because most prioritization fails before anyone ranks anything.
Prioritize — last, and almost easily. When the first four moves are done honestly, the final ranking is close to self-evident. When they’re skipped, no scoring formula can save it.
- D Decide To prioritize deliberately, rather than letting priorities happen to you. A decision to make the decision
- E Engage The right people, before the choice — not informed after it. Who is in the room, and why
- G Gather The candidates, criteria, context and constraints judgment needs. What is on the table
- A Arrange Comparisons that are fair: like against like, at the same altitude. What can be compared
- P Prioritize Last — and almost easy, when the four moves above it were done honestly. The ranked, defensible list
The method’s core claim is the platform’s core claim: prioritization is not ranking. Ranking is the last step. The work is everything upstream.
Where the method comes from
Managing Priorities
How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions · Harry Max · Two Waves, 2024
Harry Max is a co-founder of Priorities.ai. The book sets out DEGAP and the practice behind it; the platform is what the method needs to run across an organization rather than in one person's head.
What the platform builds on top
DEGAP disciplines a decision. An organization needs more than one disciplined decision — it needs decisions that hold across layers, over time, under change. That’s what the platform adds:
Transit across the organization. The Cascade carries a decision up and down your real reporting structure before it’s final — vision flowing down, ground truth flowing up — so every level’s fingerprints are on the result.
A durable record. Decision traceability means every ratified priority is queryable to its rationale: who, what criteria, what tradeoffs. Not just now — reconstructable years from now.
A plan you can measure change against. The Plan of Record turns published priorities into a commitment with evidence attached — what’s above the line, what’s below, and why.
Discipline about change itself. When the world shifts, the platform distinguishes a signal-justified pivot from a whim — because every priority carries its frame, so change is always measured against a fixed baseline.
A book can teach one person the method. Infrastructure lets an organization run it — repeatedly, legibly, at scale, as one loop: Unify, Understand, Act.
See the method run on your decision
The fastest way to evaluate a method is not to read about it.