The Glorious Art of Noping
During an All Hands recently a question came up from the customer-facing teams. Why don't we have support for X feature yet? The short answer was "we made a bad priority call". The shorter answer is no one said "no" to something else. Now, this happens in every R&D org. This is not unique to our team, our product, or our company. I've been guilty of this myself in my career, and no doubt I'll make this mistake again in the future.
Yes is the most dangerous word in a product manager's vocabulary.
So what went wrong? Months ago someone came to the team and said "We need a thing for a particular customer and we need it fast". That feature was prioritized because a big name in the company wanted it to be. You've been there, someone comes down, usually under pressure, and says "Please deliver this" and you, being the super helpful human that you are, say "of course we can figure this out!". Yes is the most dangerous word in a product manager's vocabulary. We want to make customers, our business, and our teams happy. But saying yes can have some incredibly serious impacts on our overall goals. The trade-off in this instance was a short-term gain to help one big issue we faced at that time, the long-term issue was another feature was deprioritized. They both required the same development team. There was simply not enough capacity. In delaying that other feature we caused way more strife today than we would have experienced missing that one feature.
As a product manager, you are an immensely powerful voice in the future of your roadmap, the use of your teams, and the customer impact you can have. People have talked about PMs like mini CEOs, and in a lot of ways we are. We can have far-reaching impact with what feels like fairly benign decisions. No one did anything wrong in making this decision at the time, our jobs are a series of choices between two crappy decisions all the time. We're always faced with time constraints, resource constraints, and a huge pile of needs. The art of being a product manager is the ability to pick the best path more often than not.
Say no to your team, to your customer, to the CEO if you have to!
This is where I firmly believe the most important skill a product manager can have is the ability to say NO. Say no to your team, to your customer, to the CEO if you have to! Your job is to gather as much data as possible, pick up your crystal ball and look to the future and uncover how your current choice will affect you 1 month, 9 months, and even 24 months from now. It's not just that you say no, but how you say it. You need data and solid reasoning for it. You need to be able to explain and defend your position, mostly because everyone wants you to say yes. When you turn down a project you need to be aware of the audience you're saying no to. A customer will need a soft landing. "I would love to work on this, but I also know you've been looking for this major improvement and that's what we're focusing on. I'll circle back around with you when we come back to this.". Whereas saying no to a CEO is a bit different. "I hear you that you need X. I can do X, but it'll cost you Y and Z. Those items now won't be delivered for 6-12months, and we have [insert number of customers] expecting those items before end of year.", if you can tie this back to sales numbers or promises made to customers that can be crucial information for them to be aware of.
When the team and I dug into a project and we decided we definitely were not going to do that thing, we had data to back up that decision too. It'll cost us X dollars to build, Y development time, we have Z amount of customers that will want this. For that amount of money, on that team, for that time period, I can do all of these other projects instead. Or maybe that feature doesn't fit with your strategic vision. Or maybe it would mean unrealistic ongoing costs you aren't ready for. Does this project move the needle? Does it align with the vision? And what do we lose by doing it? All these should be questions you ask before picking a path.
I want to take a second to plug an article by a good friend of mine that encouraged me to also consider the ethical dilemmas of saying no to projects. If you have a few mins, it's a great read: The Pitfall of Utilitarian Decisions in Product Development.
All that said...you'll pick the wrong path. I do. I will again. Sometimes our crystal balls are foggy. So today, good product leaders admitted we made a mistake and explained how we're going to do better and work that deprioritized feature back in. Say no more than you say yes. Protect your teams, your roadmap, and your vision. But be prepared to explain why.
Have you made mistakes like this? How did you solve them? What are your tricks to avoiding them? And more importantly what is your proudest "nope" moment?
