Being a PM is a hard job. You have to know a bit about – tech, business, design, marketing and you have to know your customer and market better than anyone else.
You have to be good at communication, negotiation, presentation, simplification, persuasion and arguably the hardest – prioritisation.
Prioritisation is hard because there are just too many people pulling and pushing you in different directions.
Let’s take the most common challenge of figuring out what goes into a release
⁃ customers want a bunch of improvements
⁃ Salesperson wants new features to close that large deal
⁃ CEO wants another cool feature and 10 new deals by end of the quarter
⁃ Dev team can’t do all of this in one month, plus there are a bunch of bugs to fix
If that wasn’t tough enough – you have 20 items on the list but can get only 4 in the release.
It’s not enough to say that prioritization is a must, you also need a method.
Start with these questions:
1. What’s the company’s or BU strategy
2. What are your product goals
3. What can you deliver and when
4. What is the sales and marketing plan
Then prioritise based on what you want and can achieve.
How do you prioritize?