Product Managers at Work
In my first months as a PM, I* was more of a “prioritization machine” than a PM. Not in a good way. Engineers would ask me to help prioritize their projects, assuming that I had more context on what they should be working on. Sometimes I would spend the entire day answering questions about prioritization. I felt important -- after all, isn’t this what PMs are supposed to do? Take full accountability of a team’s decisions and outcomes? I soon realized that while I felt effective, I really was just stroking my own ego -- and if a teammate had to wait on my decision, I was the biggest bottleneck. Instead, I needed to design a way for teammates to feel that they had agency to make their own decisions.
Prioritization is one of those elusive tasks. There are many articles on prioritization: popular articles often tell you to calculate each feature’s Cost vs. Impact score or consider the Reach, Impact, Cost, and Effort (RICE). Despite all the literature online, people still frequently ask about how to prioritize well, which is a sign of a challenging problem. The issue with these common frameworks is that while they’re good for prioritizing at the task-level, they’re not always applicable for prioritizing at the roadmap level across projects. In fact, using these cost/impact frameworks will often lead a team to prioritize low-hanging fruits rather than drive real impact.
To address my problem, I created a team-wide prioritization guideline. The guideline would be anchored on two things: team goal and stage of the team. I would create a 3 bullet point prioritization guideline and get my team’s alignment on it. The guidelines roll up to the team goal (or set of goals), where tasks that contribute most to the team goal usually get higher priority. The guideline also takes team stage into consideration: you might have one team that is focused on a high-profile product launch, while another team might be more focused on sustaining consistent growth. The guideline should prioritize projects most critical for the team's success for that stage.
