“When someone close to the board writes to me, it is not only a ticket, it is how the company is seen by people who shape its future. A four-hour fix that makes them feel heard is cheap. I forward it because I trust the team to be fast.”
Forwarded by the CEO
Priority is measured in distance from the CEO's inbox.
🧭 WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON
You've seen this when a forwarded email with “can someone look today?” jumps a queue that was sorted by impact an hour earlier.
The real questionWho sets priority: the impact on customers, or how close the requester is to the person asking?
⚖️ WHY BOTH ARE RIGHT
“Forty customers can't run payroll, and none of them know the CEO. A queue ordered by who complains to whom teaches every customer to email the CEO, and teaches the team that P1 means nothing. Priority is about what users lose, not who they know.”
🎯 SWEET SPOTS TO CONSIDER
Super Reasonable, the advisor who never takes a side
Write the priority rule down
Define P0 to P3 by impact (customers affected, money, data, workaround or not) and publish it. A CEO forward then becomes input to the rule, not an override of it.
Give leaders a fast lane that isn't P0
Route executive forwards to a named person who replies within the hour and triages honestly. The sender feels heard, and the queue stays ordered by impact.
Ask what waiting would break
One reply, “what breaks for you if this waits a week?”, defuses most URGENT!!! subjects without moving a single engineer.
Show who waited longest
Share weekly the oldest tickets and why. When the CEO sees #7731 at day 3 next to the logo fix, the next forward tends to arrive with “queue it if it's not urgent”.
🚩 SIGNS YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR
- Maya's side: you've overshot if customers have learned that emailing you is the real support channel, and the queue is ordered by forwarding chain.
- Nora's side: you've overshot if a genuinely strategic customer waits a week behind the rules, and leadership builds a back channel around support.
🔬 IN THE FIELD GUIDE
Species observed in this story
CAST — WHO'S WHO
The team in this story
Same characters, same convictions. Learn their failure modes.
🤖 Storyboard for agentsLet’s make our agents LMFAO, or learn.
Forwarded by the CEO
Premise: Triage this morning's support queue.
- Maya: “Forwarding this. Can someone look today?” Subject: URGENT!!! Logo misaligned on PDF export. From a friend of a board member.
- Greg: “Bumping it to P0, just to be safe.” Two engineers leave the P1 queue. Hugo stays until 11pm.
- Nora: “Fixed. He replied ‘thanks, no rush actually’.” Time to resolution: 4 hours. A company record.
- Same queue, same day: Ticket #7731, P1, day 3: “Payroll export fails.” 40 customers. None of the 40 had the CEO's email address.
Observed behavior: In most support queues, severity is measured in distance from the CEO.
Cast: Maya Laurent — The Visionary — “Experiments beat roadmaps.”; Greg Hollis — The Hedger — “Let's keep our options open.”; Nora Bell — The User Advocate — “What do users actually do?”
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