Product Management in Practice: A Real-World Guide to the Key Connective Role of the 21st Century

But as with all aspects of product management, roadmaps and prioritization are best approached not as sources of authority, but rather as opportunities to connect and align.

often suggest that product managers set up an official process and/or template for handling last-minute requests. The following basic template can provide a good place to start:

In Agile parlance, a finite amount of time devoted to learning, researching, and/or experimenting (as opposed to building or coding) is often called a “spike.”

wasn’t “write a bunch of code to complete this feature,” but rather “research five possible implementation approaches that would help us better understand this feature.” Just because we are going into execution mode does not mean that we should stop learning, or that the only work we should value and prioritize is work that results in an immediate

Instead, you must do whatever you can to make sure that your organization’s goals are as clear and actionable as possible.

The bottom line with prioritization is this: prioritization will be as easy or as difficult as your goals are clear, well understood, and actionable. For that reason, prioritization tends to be a microcosm of organizational dynamics at large. Is your organization slapdash, disorganized, and chaotic? Your prioritization process will likely be the sa

Invite them into a conversation in which you are collaboratively exploring multiple solutions to a well-understood user need, rather than debating a single, predetermined solution.

I hadn’t done the work of getting people to agree on the core user need, or presenting different possible paths to addressing that need. Instead, I just laid out, “This is exactly what we should do and why.” People don’t know where to give you feedback when you present everything all at once in a big meeting that way.

by asking him which option he feels best aligns with the goals of the project.