If you lead ops at a SaaS company, you’ve probably faced this: requests and issues coming from every direction - sales, support, marketing, product, leadership - piling up faster than your team can process them.
The hardest part isn’t just collecting these requests.
It’s figuring out which ones matter most and what to focus on next so your team isn’t pulled in a million directions.
Here’s how to create a smarter, centralized intake system and apply a prioritization process that actually works in the real world.
Without a shared system for handling requests, things fall through the cracks.
You get Slack messages, emails, offhand comments, or last-minute fire drills, and soon, you’re juggling way more than you can reasonably handle.
In my own experience, using Jira has been a game-changer. We put every ticket into a structured backlog where we can properly evaluate it.
We ask:
This last one is critical.
Users will often tell you what they want, but it’s your job as the SME to dig deeper and make sure you’re solving the right problem, not just taking orders.
From there, we carve out time to handle critical issues ASAP, while organizing new feature work into sprints. That balance keeps us responsive without constantly derailing roadmap work.
Once you’ve got requests flowing into one place, the next step is: how do you decide what to do first?
You can’t work on everything at once, and you can’t just go by “whoever yells the loudest.”
Here’s a simple framework we’ve used:
Business Impact - Will this unlock revenue, reduce churn, or address a key risk?
Urgency - Is this time-sensitive (customer commitments, breaking bugs, deadlines)?
Effort/Complexity - How big is the lift? Is it a quick win or a heavy project?
Strategic Alignment - Does this directly support our current company goals or OKRs?
You can assign scores, categories (P1, P2, P3), or just have a clear discussion, but the important part is having some structured lens to guide decisions, rather than gut feel.
In my experience, the biggest stress point between ops teams and stakeholders is a lack of communication.
People don’t just want you to take action, they want to understand what’s happening and why.
Overcommunicating progress, sharing clear status updates, and being transparent about trade-offs helps build trust. It shows people you’re not ignoring their requests. You’re making thoughtful, prioritized decisions.
It also reduces those constant “any updates on this?” pings that drain your focus.
You don’t have to go enterprise-level right away, but some tools can seriously help as you scale:
Start small and keep it lightweight — the point is clarity, not bureaucracy.
At the end of the day, ops isn’t about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying yes to the right things.
By centralizing requests, digging into the real problems, and applying a clear, thoughtful prioritization process, you give your team the space to work on what matters most.
And when you pair that with transparent communication, you not only get more done, you build trust and credibility across the business.
Because in fast-moving SaaS, it’s not about doing it all.
It’s about doing the work that moves the needle.
You can find and clone a copy of prioritization template here.