The art of making impossible choices

Spoiler: It feels like juggling chainsaws.

Making choices is one of the most important things you’ll ever do as a product manager. This goes to the essence of our discipline. Deciding what product features to build when facing competing demand and limited resources.

How do you prioritize what to do and when to do it? How do you build a robust product roadmap and a successful product? In a game of economics, how do you find the efficiencies?

I covered this topic recently at #ProductCon conference in London, organised by Product School. Watch the video here!

But before getting into that, a quick reminder of why we do what we do.

A reminder

I believe Product Managment is the best job in the world.

Why? A few reasons.

As product managers, we have the power to effect positive change in people’s lives, and deeply connect with their emotions.

And with great power, comes great responsibility.

We don’t just reach a few. With a flick of a switch we touch hundreds, thousands, millions of people and create measurable impact in their lives. Depending on the quality of our work, they will love, like, ignore or hate, and you will feel their passion.

Being a Product Manager is sitting at the intersection of quintessential human endeavours, like art, science, engineering, psychology, economics. You get to be surrounded by experts at their best, showing you what perfection could be and how you should probably avoid it, rather approach it in an asymptotical trajectory.

You are then a director of the orchestra, in front of talented artists, making sure they individually and collectively perform a wonderful symphony.

You’re a writer of stories, delivering your product vision as a narrative that connects with human understanding and offers a credible sequence of events. You’ll use this as a tool for evangelism and to get buy in, and as a attainable path to success.

You’re a tinkerer with toys and money, prepared to try new things and experiment, fail (exceptionally), learn and improve. You don’t enjoy failing, and I recommend you don’t aim for it, but you’re not afraid of being wrong and confident enough to admit when you are.

You’re the leader that motivates people to jump on a grand adventure, however daunting it will appear. You’ll show the way.

You’re a captain that brings superheroes together to transform ideas into actual value shipped to customers. And you will together build amazing things, launch incredible products.

You’ll mentor and lead people to be at their best and work together, in collaboration and cross pollination. This is about the people, people.

You’re the one walking around tirelessly, plugged into all conversations to understand everyone’s context and challenges, capturing feedback and ideas that will enrich your story.

The Hipster with sensibility about art and design. The Hacker with knowledge of code, pipelines, artefacts and API contracts. The Hustler that knows what it takes to rally an organisation around assembling, packaging and releasing a product.

You will build trust with your team, peers, leaders and stakeholders. Trust comes from being open and transparent, yes. But. crucially, trust comes from predictable delivery. Deliver on what you promise. And if you cannot, let there be no surprises.

Finally, you’re an influencer, not by the power you possess, but by of the power of your ideas. Not landgrabby, but mindbendy.

Are you believer now?

Good.

Now, what is it that a product manager does all day?

Choices

We make lots of them.

We make choices when faced with competing opportunities, in an environment with contraints, over a finite set of resources. There’s only so much you can do with a given team size, set of skills and body of experience.

You job nevertheless is to deliver continuous increments of value. Not just any feature. The “jobs to be done”, the outcomes you want to drive for your customers. And you have to do it at a predictable delivery pace, non-stop, like a juggling juggernaut (…a jug-jug).

Well, this is pretty hard.

Tip: You have to choose wisely. A product manager’s life is about standing at the crossroads and choosing the right path, at the right time.

Every. Single. Day.

At different levels of abstraction. Whether it’s defining your product strategy and the initiatives, epics, features, stories, tasks that will bring it to life. Or if you’re deciding to attack a particular KPI like growth, activation, engagement, customer retention and advocacy, or deciding on strategies like expanding and scaling your platform for future growth.

You make decisions throughout the agile product lifecycle, from discovery to sprint planning, in sprint, throughout release and after go live. And you must use data, product instincts and consensus to be convincing at it!

OMG so how do you negotiate this seemingly impossible challenge?

Technique

Well, you need a model, a technique.

Some consented approach your team and stakeholders will agree with and buy into. Even if you disagree about the specific prioritization, you can agree on the criteria.

Don’t panic. I’ve come up with the best possible solution, and I’ve named it:

Patent pending.

There’s 4 things you need to do.

1. Understand the context

Here’s where you need to take a good look around and know where you are, what others are doing. Industry trends and competitor analysis is a good starting point. Constant observation is better. Download your competitors products and USE THEM.

Once you’ve looked around, you can ask yourself questions.

Are you one of the pack? Or are you on a different mission? Are you a leader or a follower?

Do you want to switch roles?

You also need to look inside. What is you business strategy? What are your goals, initiatives, objectives? In the end your priorities should be tied back to those goals and the KPIs you’ve chosen to address. This is how you justify spending resources on one thing over the other, and it’s hard to dispute against it.

Are your business units looking to serve communities at a wider scale and solve pains for a set of different addressable markets? Are you creating capabilities for market growth to expand and enable your business on new areas or territories? Are you after a new digital propositions that addresses a specific vertical? Are you going deep on an existing proposition that you wish to develop further?

Finally, if yours is a regulated environment, are you faced with a body of regulation which you need to address in order to continue to operate in the industry?

2. Understand the need

In today’s attention economy, I urge you to pause more.

Stop that noise!

Listen and observe very carefully at what your being asked for. Sometimes it comes as a whisper, other times it’s a resounding message.

First it’s your customers. What are their needs? What are the jobs they need to do?

What will give them delight?

It’s your job to distill the need and deliver real value over perception.

Like being a parent, you’re the adult that does not always give their kids candy. And you certainly don’t blindly commit to a feature you’re unable to deliver. You use data and, if none available, your strategy and vision, as a measure of what value is, over the perception of value.

But there are more people asking.

Designers will want to ensure enough time and resources are put to building a user experience that is simple, useful and crafted.

Engineering will recommend effort spent on a product that is resilient, scalable, one your customers can trust will work and respond every time, regardless of load. They will also add an automation tax which is upfront cost but a great investment over time.

Operations will urge to spend time on tech debt repayments. What is considered an high upfront cost, can really become transformative and end up being your best investment.

See? There’s lots of economics in product management.

3. Consider the execution

There’s cost, effort and complexity to bringing any idea to life. The outcomes you want to drive ultimately translate into the expenditure of resources.

Ask yourself: Are you equipped to deliver?

Like a kitchen, do you have the right ingredients? Like a workshop, do you have the right tools? Are you aware of the intrincate network of dependencies involved in building a predictable product roadmap? Often times you build upon other other people’s platforms and services, and your priorities might not always map to theirs.

You can identify and interlock most of the known dependencies, however you won’t always have all the answers, so you’ll have to take some calculated risks and understand the consequences. Product management is inherently a risk tolerance exercise.

I highly recommend you know what the blast radius is when something goes wrong, what your exposure is and how this affects your customers, your business, your team, your product.

So, it becomes a complex relationship between parameters like value vs cost, and reach vs effort, and it can become hard to negotiate. Fortunately, there are some models you can use.

If you lay your options on a Value vs Complexity scale, you can quickly see there are some features with low complexity and high value that win over low value and high complexity. The other quadrants require additional inspection.

The RICE model puts the Reach, Impact, and Confidence to deliver against Effort to provide an indicator that helps rank features against each other.

The Kano model is a bit different. It breaks down features into 3 basic categories, where on the bottom one, the baseline expectations, the customer satisfaction does not really grow beyond a certain point no matter how much you refine the implementation.

The bulk of features, linear satisfiers, their usage and satisfaction does grow proportionally to the love you put into them. The third group have a compound effect, where customer satisfaction grows faster with the degree of implementation. So this model informs of what features are worth considering when you have restrictions on spend.

These models are not magic formulas, rather tools you rely on to quantify relative weight of different options. The key is to arrange the sequence.

4. Arrange the sequence

You know the context. You’ve understood the need and considered the execution. Now this is where it all comes together.

Arranging the sequence is like solving a puzzle. It’s a game of multiple dimensions and parameters intertwined in non-linear behaviors, competing against each other in often times non-predictable ways. A sometimes exhausting game of interlocking context and needs and resources and risks and complexity.

First and foremost, I would strongly recommend you follow the story, the narrative, the masterplan you’ve devised that drives everything. This is what will help you communicate your decisions, whatever comes out of the model or framework you use.

All things being equal, and depending on where you are on your product lifecycle, you should try and arrange for a continuous sequence of increments in value. Customers want more and if new features help them do more jobs, or do the same jobs better and faster, then you’re already winning.

So you could focus on small increments over a wide customer base over large features that only address a small audience, however profitable.

However sometimes there’s planned work that, though time consuming, serves as an enabler to accelerate. One team can focus on building capabilities that will generate new business, new value, new customers or new use cases, so perhaps its best to let them run ahead and lay the tracks, since once you establish a larger platform you can then multiply your growth.

Some of these are really slow to realize, and it’s hard to even see them moving, so naturally it can become hard to see the value or to continue to justify the spend.

When it comes to the worst, it takes guts, but you could consider it a failed venture and discard it altogether, whatever the sunk cost. You, as a product manager, are accountable to make (or influence the making of) these hard decisions.

This is about economics and the efficient use of limited resources to obtain the maximum output. You can improve your chances by aligning resources and timing their execution to find synergies, so all in the end deliver a dance and a cadence of value that fulfills your vision and makes your story a reality.

At the end of the day, you get the feeling you’re a special kind of juggler. One that must be careful in his choices, because a mistake could often times be costly and quite painful.

So be prepared. Get ready. This great power comes with great responsibility. So use it wisely, be humble and never stop learning.