“What needs to be obvious?” is a better question to ask than “What’s high priority?”
I don't think one is better than the other. They are both critical and serve a different purpose.
"What needs to be obvious?" is a design question. It's important, but it doesn't tell you what you should be doing each day.
"What's high priority?" is a project management question. Once your product already exists, and you have a zillion features that should be possible but don't need to be easy, you then have to prioritize all of them to figure out what gets done.
I think this is exactly his point. Most web projects start out immediately in project management crunch mode, listing long sets of features that are "priorities" for various use cases or stakeholders. In project thinking, lots of things can be priorities because you just do the first priority first and then you can add developers or time to do the other "priorities."
What needs to be obvious? makes clear that priority, from a design standpoint, is a fixed resource that time, money, and manpower can never buy more of. You want to add this feature and make it obvious, yes you can afford to do so, but no you cannot do it without making other things less obvious.
I don't think he is talking about "high priority" in the project management sense, rather in the visual or cognitive sense that the presentation of a feature to the user is highly prioritized. His argument is basically that it is more important or relevant to make the feature "obvious" (easy to understand) rather than "high priority" (attention grabbing).
I don't think one is better than the other. They are both critical and serve a different purpose.
"What needs to be obvious?" is a design question. It's important, but it doesn't tell you what you should be doing each day.
"What's high priority?" is a project management question. Once your product already exists, and you have a zillion features that should be possible but don't need to be easy, you then have to prioritize all of them to figure out what gets done.