Thread by @Pentropy

Some notes on product prioritisation

Product prioritisation in not a just a product function activity. By nature of their role, PMs do facilitate prioritisation but its much more than putting high medium low in an excel sheet of features (or Trello or asana or aha or jira or basecamp or <Insert tool you use>

Balance prioritisation for both Users (U) AND Business (B). As a PM or Startup founder, be totally focused on the User. Always make for the user but at the same time don’t totally forget the business and vice versa

If you only prioritise for the user and keep doing that quarter by quarter, good chance you will have an awesome product. But you may end up risking the business model and training the users on habits that are not sustainable in long term

If you only prioritise for the business (Specially in early days) and not for the user, you will most probably end up not acquiring enough users to create a critical mass or end up creating creating a leaky bucket (Popular in large markets like India and Indonesia)

As a PM (or whatever fancy title you have) listen to the business team’s problems and feature/product suggestions but don’t fall into the - ‘Hey, Look XYZ have the same since ABC’ trap. Your product roadmap shouldn’t be governed by your feature parity list

Assertively challenge their asks & don’t solve problems that don’t impact either U or B. Train stakeholders to make trade-offs of on short term pain points VS features to help either attract or retain quality Users. Else, your PMs will be seen as arrogant NO saying ogres

Don’t fall into the ‘We aren’t innovating enough’ trap as well and stick to ‘What problems do we need to solve’ this week/month/quarter. The proportion of necessary vs ambitions is different for all products at different times

Stakeholders, in their pressure of targets, would want new fancy features every month. And will forget what they wanted 2 months back. So by the time you build something you all agreed on they’d have forgotten and now they want another fancy toy. Learn to avoid this cycle!

Give Freedom to your PMs, engineers and designers to execute. If you’ve hired good people, pushing them to deliver fast/more will NEVER work!

At the same time, make sure they understand U and B well and don’t turn product building into self satisfying home projects

Try to build a culture of letting go. PMs, engineers and designers should be able to let go of the ‘features’ they’ve been wanting to do in changing circumstances without resentments.

'Look at the bigger picture' is not a myth!