To avoid pursuing low-value AI initiatives, use the RICE scoring method (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort). This product management framework helps teams quantify and rank potential projects, ensuring resources are allocated to initiatives with the highest potential return on investment.

To overcome emotional attachment to projects, turn each of 200+ initiatives into a playable card with stats. By getting the senior team to play a game, they naturally discard the "weaker" projects, painlessly culling the list without emotional debate.

Treat your product and engineering teams as stewards of the company's most precious capital: their time. A capital allocation framework forces leadership to ask if this "investment" is being spent on the initiatives with the highest strategic return, not just fulfilling requests.

The "closet cleaning" approach—killing one initiative for every new one started—is too rigid and ineffective. It fails to account for the vast differences in resource requirements between projects. Swapping a major program for a minor task ("a wool coat for a pair of socks") does not solve overload.

People have a "subtractive neglect bias," overlooking solutions that involve removing tasks. By physically visualizing all commitments (like on Post-it notes), teams and individuals can immediately see they are overcommitted, forcing them to clarify priorities and remove or pause lower-impact projects.

A simple 2x2 framework can clarify project strategy. Plot ideas on axes of internal team passion and external market evidence. This creates four quadrants: Kill (low/low), Find a Champion (low passion/high evidence), Sandbox (high passion/low evidence), and Scale (high/high), providing a clear path for each initiative.

Jacobs's team uses the acronym WOTWOM—Waste Of Time, Waste Of Money—as a rapid check on new ideas. Any suggestion can be challenged with this label if it doesn't clearly contribute to organic revenue growth or margin expansion. This simple tool creates a culture focused on high-leverage activities.

By centralizing oversight at the hub, the model prevents teams from becoming emotionally attached to a single asset. This structure allows leadership to make objective, data-driven decisions to terminate unpromising programs without it being seen as a personal or career failure for the team involved.

To rationalize a project portfolio, first define your organization's core services from a customer's viewpoint. Then, map every ongoing project and team to these services. This visual exercise immediately reveals where investment is clustered, where it's missing, and where efforts are being duplicated.