Most Product Managers Who Use Prioritization Frameworks Have Forgotten What They Were Hired For
Learn how strategy gives us a better framework for decision-making
Hard to believe we’re almost halfway through the first quarter of the year!
How’s everyone doing with their personal strategies? Are your choices starting to pay off? How about your progress reverse-engineering your organization’s higher-level strategy?
And don’t forget, you can also reverse-engineer and design a strategy for your team or function, as well.
But more on that soon.
In this edition
This week, we’ll look at the fundamental flaw underlying feature prioritization, probably the activity Product Managers engage in most.
Still on the theme of prioritization, we’ll check in on how some other top product thought leaders think about prioritization.
And I’ll share my biggest takeaways from a strategy thought leader’s recent appearance on Lenny’s Podcast.
Let’s go!
The One Reason Why Prioritization Frameworks Will Never Work, and What to Do Instead
Reclaiming the essence of Product vs. Project Management
My latest long-form piece starts with one of my favorite recent product experiences that went from Post-Its to working software to promising beta before descending into feature bloat and irrelevance.
I share the hardest lessons from that experience, and how strategy can help you and your product avoid our fate.
Read the full piece here on my blog
Product Thought Leaders speak out on the dangers of prioritization frameworks
“…we can’t generically prioritize work, validate potential improvements with all audiences, or assume that every customer segment will value benefits similarly. IMHO, sorting backlogs and setting roadmaps based only on multi-column spreadsheets or cost of delay or WSJF is fundamentally flawed. Product management malpractice.”
And Product Management thought leader Saeed Khan writes:
“You shouldn’t be prioritizing “features”. Yes, I said that. Features are implementations that are linked to problems or opportunities. You should be focused on prioritizing problems and opportunities that are tied to higher level goals and strategies. You should not prioritize features.”
As Andrea Saez points out, prioritization fails us at the most basic level:
“Above all, frameworks lack one key aspect of product management: empathy.”
Highlight Recap of Strategy Thought Leader Richard Rumelt on Lenny’s Podcast
In product management circles, Richard Rumelt is universally praised, and his book “Good Strategy / Bad Strategy” is acclaimed as the gold standard to understand and craft product strategy.
But because Rumelt is first and foremost an academic, I see “GS/BS” like “Measure What Matters,” a book with interesting theoretical insights that gets you excited about the promise and potential of strategy.
Nevertheless, I did enjoy Rumelt’s ramblings (all ~2 hours) during his recent appearance on the
podcast.Here were a few of my top takeaways:
“Strategy is first & foremost a problem-solving framework.”
“Make sure your strategy has coherence– in other words, don’t do stuff that cancels each other out.”
“Ambitions are not a strategy.”
“The list of all the things you wish would happen is not a strategy.”
“There’s no strategy separate from action.”
And my top takeaway is a simple and powerful metaphor Rumelt shared on the power of strategy, picked up & retweeted by Lenny himself:
“Strategy is like a magnifying glass that concentrates the rays of the sun to create massive heat and power.”
Awesome, right? Really sums it up in a brilliant way.
That’s it for this edition!
Until next week, cheers!
Mike