Let’s Get It Done – What Do You Do?

Product Management 1 Minute

Play out this scenario. You are a product manager. A senior executive in your company has an idea about what your product needs to do. S/he has sufficient understanding of the product and the market. S/he speaks with as many customers as you do if not more. If s/he happens to be in charge of engineering and product development, they also know the technology, effort, complexity. The edict is passed down – “We need to do X. Let’s get it done.” and this generates a perfect maelstrom of activity. You are the product manager. What do you do?

Please share your thoughts in the comments. Trying out a new format for a post, but this is a real situation for many product managers.

Published by Rahul Abhyankar

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6 thoughts on “Let’s Get It Done – What Do You Do?”

  1. Oh.. I have been been there !. It is hard to stop the momentum – when lot of yes sayers want to join in and start scheduling meetings to think about the implementation..

    As a product manager, we need to speak up to an effect something like – It sure sounds like an interesting idea. Let me research on that and come back to you with some more data around this. Can I schedule a follow up discussion with you on this topic once I collect some data points.

    At least, this way, we will have a chance to think through the pain points / solution space, validate such suggested solutions with other leading customer focus groups before we start rolling our sleeves.

    Af course, it takes lot of guts to ask for time to think through . But, most of the time boss appreciates such due diligence.

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  2. Agree with Sriram above. I have created a template which I use to evaluate all the new features and everytime I get new feature request I check it against my backlog of items that I have planned.

    Template contains few basic questions

    What is the customer problem/pain?
    What is the business needs?
    What will be the benefit to the customer?
    Why is our organisation suited to do this?
    What does potential solution looks like?
    How will competition respond?
    Does it fit our company strategy?

    And then another set of questions where I check the ROI of this investment
    What is the market size? (how big is he opportunity?)
    How much market share can we take?
    How much will it cost?

    And not all features needs to be evaluated in same way but if there is no template there is no way to say NO. As a product manager my job is to say NO to feature requests unless I feel that it will add value to our product.

    So create a template for yourself and then ask your boss to fill that template and then verify that new feature requests is better suited for your organisation.

    cheers

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  3. Hear hear on both comments… The first thing I would do is validate the business case (how important is it really? How much revenue is impacted?, etc.), and of the list of features that are already on the list, which one (or two) do you want to remove in place of your new “hot” feature. As long as the benefit to the customer and business is positive, then I would add it.

    My $0.02 worth…

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