Product Management when Everything’s a Top Priority

“Just say No,” they said. “CEO of Product,” they said. Time to stop grumbling!

One of the biggest responsibilities of a product management team is making sure that they’re relentlessly prioritising the highest value initiatives. How they do this will depend on the environment they’re in, but fundamentally it should involve things like:

• User research
• Market research
• Sales & support feedback
• Tech trends
• Industry reports

These all get synthesised by hard-working product managers, originally to pull together a coherent product strategy, and subsequently to make sure that they can adapt and continue to concentrate on the things that really matter.

So far, so good, right? No surprises here.

However, a pattern I’ve seen personally as well as with people I’ve mentored goes as follows:

• The company didn’t do any of that boring strategy stuff
• They built a bunch of things to react to tactical issues
• They rushed them to win that next big deal
• They did just about enough but didn’t finish it properly