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Prioritization Shouldn't Be Hard

Melissa Perri was helping one of her clients interview a VP of Product candidate. The candidate was on the case study portion of the interview where they were asked to prioritize the major initiatives of the company. They had a week to interview stakeholders across the business and could get any data they needed.

They first met with the CEO and asked for the short and long term goals of the company. The CEO responded with:

• Grow revenue

• Reduce costs for operation

• Expand upmarket

After a week of conversations with sales, marketing, product, and engineering, the candidate came up with the following answer.

When Melissa saw this, she told the CEO, “this is not your VP of Product.” He responded with “Why? They helped us get some order into a very messy situation. We really need the help.”

When you are in the position to hire an executive Product Manager, having them organize everyone’s thoughts isn’t enough. They need to have a framework to know if the right choices are being made. There needs to be a broader product strategy they develop and the prioritization choices should feed back into the strategy they define. 

“A senior Product person’s job is to help you create and deploy that strategy in a way where every team member can easily make a prioritization decision on a day to day basis.”

Instead of the candidate explaining how they were going to create the strategy and framework, they put the prioritization back on the rest of the organization. The candidate asked them to create their own strategy framework and prioritization method. The only work the candidate did was pulling together a pretty table. They did not lead.

There are many different prioritization frameworks that can be found on Google:

• Ranking the features from 1–10

• Giving your stakeholders $100 fake dollars and having them place them on what they want

• MoSCoW

• Weighted Scoring (what our candidate did above, with arbitrary scores, not data to back it up)

Melissa views these as helpful frameworks, but are only things new product managers should use. A mature product organization leadership team should not be using these techniques because they don’t give real business insight. Only a product strategy will provide the business insights you need to make decisions. 

“Product leaders and leadership in general should be setting the strategy that lets teams get rid of these methods and start using real data. When leaders continue to use these methods instead of setting strategy, that tells me they are shifting the accountability of prioritization from themselves onto others. That is not leadership.”

Prioritization becomes easy when a clear strategy is formed and communicated. If there is no clear strategy, that needs to be the first thing a product leader needs to complete. 

Link to the full article by Melissa Perri.

End Note

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Have a great day,

Nick