It’s Not Difficult to Prioritize — You’re Just Not Ruthless Enough

Why being nice is killing your product

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash

Let me guess. Your 1 year roadmap is 5 years long. Your backlog is a graveyard of “maybe”s that everyone knows will never happen. And you keep nodding along as if everything is going to go swimmingly.

(We all know it won’t.)

I understand why this keeps happening to you — I’ve been there, too.

• Sales is banging down your door about that enterprise feature they swear will land five new clients (don’t worry about the fact that ink never met paper last time, this time is different)
• Customer Support has escalated seventeen tickets about a bug that affects precisely 0.03% of your users (but one of them is veeeery vocal and keeps tweeting angrily at the CEO)
• Engineers are not-so-quietly staging a rebellion over tech debt that they swear will sink the entire product if not addressed immediately (although the system hasn’t imploded yet, so who’s to say this is the time it will?)
• Your CPO just returned from a conference with a Notion doc full of “game-changing” ideas that simply must be done immediately (AKA before the next board meeting)