Prioritization/Saying No
One of the most critical role a Product Manager has is that of documenting priority of features & tasks. Why just document & not prioritize? Because priority in many cases comes from external factors. Your Senior Leadership Team (STL), a large customer, a large shift in the market, a Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GCR) issue. This is one of the reasons I give lesser weight to Prioritization modes and Frameworks like RICE, ICE etc. They are good to know, and good ways to document priority, but at times you will end up building something lower down the stack.
Remember the world is littered with Dead on Arrival products and features.
Documenting priority makes it easier to showcase to all your stakeholders what is at stake.
Prioritizing features is also driven by that strategy your organization has taken for the quarter or year. If your CEO has announced a “Year of Efficiency” all your features will have their priorities reordered.
Building Segments
One critical element to document priority is to take segment your features by key initiatives your organization or you would like to take up. Anything outside that automatically falls lower in the stack. This simplifies communication of priority.
A few good ways to segment your features in via documented by the 2 articles listed below.
Tom Tunguz wrote a post which basically split product features into 3:
- MMRs (minimum market requirements)
- Differentiators
- Neutralisers
In Addition Adam Nash suggests breaking products into the following buckets:
- Metrics Movers
- Customer Requests
- Customer Delight
Saying No!
The most common advice given to Product Managers is to say “No” to most requests. Unfortunately it ends there. Saying “No” is easy, in most cases naive, getting all your stake holders to agree to your “No” is what true Product Management is about. This brings us to one of the most important tasks of a PM, building Leverage
Saying No requires PMs building leverage for or against the required feature
More to be articulated in the near future
