Product Manager’s Secret Weapon
For those of you who have just started to jump into Product Manager bandwagon, you might wonder what is the recipe to deliver a great product while maintaining your sanity throughout the countless day of doing ideation, prioritization, managing stakeholders, or simply pitching your awesome new product ideas to your team. No books or articles could help you achieve that unless you master the art of saying “no”. Well, if you have been in PM field for a while, this might have comes naturally as you have exercised this word for many times now.
You might wonder how can saying “no” leads to a great Product Management process, here’s my perspective:
As a PM, it is natural for people to come and ask for help whenever they encounter an issue or need an enhancement on our side that could help their departments on doing their daily job. In my case, as I’m working in a large company with many departments (trust me when I say many), the request would come almost everyday and requires a lot of effort from your team’s side. If you say yes to every request, you will find your team caught in a pile of development work that might not even crucial to your product or theirs. Here’s a few tips to keep in mind on how to say no:
Hear what other has to say
A great product is built on various ideas from different sources within the organization or outside. Different functions have certain ideas or suggestion on the enhancement , for example:
- Design team might indicate what user interface would be the most user friendly/appealing to our user
- Engineer team voice a technical limitation or an alternative flow
- Customer service team voice customer’s concern or frictions in their user journey
- Sales or marketing suggest a certain feature that could possibly “sell” better
All of their inputs is undeniably important and must be taken into consideration, but as a PM you must make the hard call on which should be done first, later, or never.
Do a priority check
When we work in Product Management field, we must have a certain roadmap laid out on the plan. While a deviation from our product roadmap is inevitable, we must ensure all those incoming request still contributes towards our target. And if those request doesn’t contribute directly to our product but could potentially help those requester, it would be wise to consider it as long as it doesn’t jeopardize our long term goal.
That being said, we must always tell other team/user about your priority at the moment. This will give more understanding of whether we say “no” to their request or simply “not now” until we have more resources on our hand.
Be an objective story teller
By being a PM, it’s almost mandatory for you to be a good story teller, continuously telling people on “why” you undertook certain feature development, improvements, or changes. All of this story that you tell must also be backed by data, that way it could be more convincing and they will come to an understanding on why you choose to do certain things.
Always be an informant
Last but not least, you having to say no to a lot of people could mean that others doesn’t have any idea on what your team are currently working on and think that it won’t hurt to drop one or many requests. Having everyone informed on what’s coming, why it’s important, and when it will be executed will save you a lot on discussion on topics that aren’t related. That way you wouldn’t come across as obnoxious or indifferent when you reject those requests.
All wrapped up, that’s my secret weapon for surviving the Product Management battlefield, what’s yours? ;)
If you’re interested in applying for a full-time position or intern, Blibli is currently hiring! Send your resume to recruitment@blibli.com and get the chance to work with our PM and UX team and our own unique stories.
