{"id":18370,"date":"2015-05-19T12:16:16","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T19:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jamasoftware.com\/?p=18370"},"modified":"2023-01-12T16:55:52","modified_gmt":"2023-01-13T00:55:52","slug":"product-managers-you-can-say-no-and-still-make-people-happy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jamasoftware.com\/legacy\/blog\/2015\/05\/19\/product-managers-you-can-say-no-and-still-make-people-happy\/","title":{"rendered":"Product Managers: You Can Say No and Still Make People Happy"},"content":{"rendered":"

In just about every conversation we have with product managers we hear different versions of the same story: We must say no to feature requests that don’t map to top priorities, and we have to do it about 10 times a day.<\/p>\n

Product managers get requests from multiple sources: the sales team, key\u00a0customers, the competition, the executive team and their own\u00a0market research. Sometimes going through the process of rejecting someone’s idea can be draining, especially if there isn’t a common understanding of priorities across the organization. And no product manager wants to find themselves alienated from those key parts of the organization.<\/p>\n

How to do prioritization well–and how to defend your priorities–is an ongoing conversation in the product management community.\u00a0We\u2019ve gathered up a few recent blog posts from some of the best minds in the Product Management community who offer up their expert advice on\u00a0this topic:<\/p>\n

“Prioritization Requires Strategy”<\/a> by Rich Mironov<\/p>\n

Product Coach\u00a0Rich Mironov discusses the vital\u00a0importance of alignment among executives to ensure that the product development plan maps up to the overall\u00a0business strategy.\u00a0\u00a0In this post Mironov\u00a0describes a situation\u00a0in which\u00a0an organization wants to cut costs and scale output–at the same time– and\u00a0Product Management, in this case a director of multiple product managers, has to take responsibility for prioritization and driving alignment\u00a0at the executive level.<\/p>\n

“But without some force-ranking among these top-level issues, the development organization can\u2019t prioritize stories or work. There is no natural prioritization of development work without an underlying strategy.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Only after this strategic framework is in place can Product Management ensure that the right user stories are selected and the engineering and operations teams are working on the right things. [Read more about how Jama enables ranking.<\/a>]<\/p>\n

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“Don’t Prioritize Features Based on Development Cost”<\/a> by Jeff Lash<\/p>\n

So your product roadmap is solid, mapping to business strategy and the organization is in alignment. Then a bright developer brings an idea to you that indeed seems to fit on the roadmap, but you know from experience that’s not enough to\u00a0prioritize\u00a0this feature. In this post Jeff Lash of Sirius Decisions talks about a next level of\u00a0prioritization, not just considering the effort to\u00a0develop<\/em>\u00a0a new feature, but also the cost to test,\u00a0deploy, market, sell, and maintain it.<\/p>\n

“The cost to develop an enhancement may be only a tiny fraction of its overall cost.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before development\u00a0on a new feature can get the green light many other expenditures of effort and money have to be considered:<\/p>\n