A global priority queue is often an organisation chart in disguise.
Across teams I have led, prioritization became political when engineers were treated as a shared pool and every initiative had to compete for the same temporary capacity.
Stable teams change the mechanism: they own a problem space, preserve context, and make most local trade-offs without escalating every decision. Leadership still prioritizes — but through explicit choices about capacity, boundaries, growth, downsizing, and splitting, not through an endlessly reordered backlog.
When every request needs executive arbitration, I inspect the team topology before rewriting the roadmap.
Better prioritization often begins by making fewer decisions global.