Unlock the Power of Ruthless Prioritization
Product Management is a critical, but often misunderstood function, in every organization. Equal parts designer, developer, manager, and researcher, the Product Manager dedicates their time to balancing the various needs and inputs of an organization. The work is complex and, often, thankless.
Product Managers do their best to hide the stark sacrifices too often required to move the organization forward. With every request and requirement being the most “important” one, there’s no simple solution to finding the “best” one, at the right time. The secret is their dutiful commitment to ruthlessly prioritize everything.
Secrets serve no one — so let’s dive into some of the best techniques.
Finding Focus Fast
The best way to waste time is to not know what you are doing or where you are going. When we fail to establish a True North, we end up wandering aimlessly. This is readily avoidable.
As with a good meeting, every effort has a known agenda. In the realm of product, we are usually looking to unearth one of a few kinds of insights:
- Understanding of how a customer thinks or acts
- Problems a customer perceives or experiences
- Potential solutions to specific problems
- Performance of specific solutions
Product meetings should be organized to drive towards a specific set of these insights — the result being a focus on preparation to speak to, understand, or analyze how our time and effort can be applied. By leveraging the right tools, people, and contexts, we can maximize how our time is used and how we focus. Meet as often as needed until focus is obvious.
Product feedback, likewise, should be sorted quickly into one of these buckets to understand which force it feeds. Every piece of feedback must align to a focal point, otherwise it can’t be brought into focus and definitely cannot be reconciled. Product is about outcomes, even the invisible ones.
Divest of Distractions
If focus is the number one challenge, distractions are the second. We’re all easily distracted, especially with smart phones and laptops warming our eyes every waking minute of the day. They muse be eliminated or they’ll destroy all productivity.
There are three main kinds of distractions to keep a keen eye on:
Visual
Have you ever made a wireframe and someone asks, “Why is that red?” There’s a reason so many early prototyping tools rely on grayscale primitives — they keep you focused on the purpose, not the polish. Everything that doesn’t matter to the discussion should be left out, and everything that’s extra should be given proper context.
Conversational
Have you ever uttered the words, “What were we talking about?” Welcome back from the rabbit hole. Without even knowing it, the casual art of conversation and argumentation can lead us on a wide range of tangents. Map back to the original focus, bury items or convert them into a new kind of insight to investigate.
Social
Has anyone ever said to you, “You know, I was talking to a customer and…” Perhaps the most challenging distraction of all, social dynamics can be a powerful distraction. These kinds of distractions can often get escalated above and beyond other interests because their driven by an external party or urgency. Manage it or be managed.
Roadmaps and Roadblocks
Roadmaps are the mystical artifacts of the Product Team. Without exception, not a week goes by that an executive, employee or customer has some question related to the roadmap — everyone wants to know where we’re going. Roadmaps are towers of estimation, however, balancing equal amounts of optimism and reality.
Roadmaps aren’t everything, though. If Roadmaps are the sauage, Roadblocks are the factory that produces them — no one really wants to see inside. As it turns out, the “reality” part of Roadmaps is a complex universe of assumptions, debts and disasters that work against the delivery on our most optimistic dreams.
Good Roadmaps deliver on time and on budget. Great Roadmaps properly manage Roadmaps, giving stakeholders a true sense of what’s likely and what happens when the next boulder lands in the path. Most Roadmaps are not great and all Roadblocks suck.
Managing Personalities
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is learn how to read the room. Different personalities have different roles in finding focus and getting your priorities in order. Put them to work.
Keep an eye out for these:
Anchors
Anchors are domain experts or otherwise opinionated folks. They’ll have ideas that require the most energy to unset if they’re the wrong ones — find them early in every meeting.
Dreamers
Dreamers are usually filled with great ideas and can connect the dots quickly. They are great to get involved early to get the ball rolling.
Thinkers
Thinkers often sit quiet as they digest the conversation and its implications. They are ideal to poll throughout to see when they’ve completed their analysis.
Cheerleaders
Cheerleaders are the optimists in the room. They find the value in things fast and are quick to help others understand and rally around them.
Working with each of these personalities helps surface the best ideas quickly while also building consensus.
Reverse The Engineers
The ability to ship is product is highly dependent on the people building your product. Engineers are our partners in crime and its best to know them as best we can. It saves lots of time.
Engineers will work a problem from unknown to known, which usually involves some form of interrogation. Success may require sharpening your technical chops, developing a workable shorthand with you engineers, or likely both. Your ability to get ahead of the curve here is critical.
By anticipating the challenges your engineers may have and better understanding and appreciating how your systems and architecture work, allows you to remain focused on ideas than can be readily executed.
Prioritization is both an art and a science. Simple techniques can help us master the science of prioritization, but only with experience can we navigate the most challenging obstacle — the humanity of it.
For more thoughts on the challenges Product Managers face, check out:
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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, he writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Connect with him on LinkedIn or say hi on Twitter.
