Frequently asked PM questions (honest take)

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Since I’ve started teaching product management, I’ve found some of the same questions come up. These same questions have also come up when I mentor and coach PMs early in their careers or those looking to transition into PM, as well as when I’m speaking at some product conferences. I’ve taken some quick time to write down my answers in this post so that it will be more widely accessible to those that may find it useful, especially if I haven’t had a chance to speak with you one on one.

Without further ado:

What are some effective ways to say “no” to stakeholders?

First listen, really listen and make them feel heard. Then say no. Don’t only say no but give sound, objective reasons as to why. This can be leveraging data from your product, user research/feedback, industry/competitor trends, other priorities tied to business goals, a prioritization framework you’ve all agreed to use, etc. Also consider is this no, a “no, not ever” or a “no, not now”. If the latter, let them know it’s a future possibility but I’d caution not to promise a specific timeline of when you’ll get to it and more of a relative idea of where/when you can revisit it or slot it in. If it’s a firm “no, not ever”, encourage them to refer back to sound, objective reasons you have for the no and think of things you both can work on that do align with those.

How would you suggest to share bad news with stakeholders?

This is a hard spot to be in, it sucks. It may depend on company culture. What has served me well (or what I wish I did hindsight) in the past is not dragging it out and owning it, taking responsibility. Re-frame it into an opportunity to learn, reflect and re-group. Why did it go bad? Really analyze and identify the causes and factors, internal and/or external. Have a retro/postmortem (google it if not familiar, I believe this could be applied to anything, even family issues). Also go to the next step beyond the learnings, the action items. Now what? Determine some options for where to go from here, recommend how to move forward, what to keep in mind for next time, etc. Perhaps even write up a short document with your learnings and recommendations, share widely. Consider partnering with your team on it, it can be a therapeutic activity for your team as well, they are probably feeling bad about the thing going bad also. Help them come out on the other side of that and channel those feelings and energy into something positive. Create a more open and transparent culture so others feel more comfortable sharing and learning from failure and you can be an example for when this [something going bad] will inevitably happen again.

What are some prioritization frameworks you’d recommend?

There are tons of different frameworks out there in the product management world aimed at prioritization. However I often fined that when someone asks about which prioritization frameworks I’d recommend to help their team or organization prioritize features/products, it’s a symptom of a larger problem. They are hoping to use the framework as a crutch.

I am a believer that there is usually no blanket solution that works across teams and different companies. These frameworks and agile methodologies were created in the spirit of remaining flexible and constantly evolving how they are being used and even what they consist of. Unfortunately they often fall into the hands of a struggling team or organization who then tries to apply them in a rigid manner without remembering to account for their situation. Remember to consider your team, your company, your product, your users. It’s not a one size fits all solution!

I tend to recommend starting with the simplest approach to prioritization first (i.e. if you’re bent on using a framework, the simplest framework I believe would be value vs. effort). Only once you and your team have had a good track record of consistently documenting and prioritizing feature/product proposals using a set of objective criteria would I encourage moving on to a more complicated model that involves multiple inputs and calculations like RICE. Even in larger companies, including my time working on Minecraft at Microsoft and at Spotify, I will admit that we did not utilize prioritization frameworks consistently and often defaulted back to subjective ways of decision making when it came to prioritization. This is why I think it’s important to not take simplicity for granted. Get in the habit first! Make sure you have a few cycles where your team/organization gets used to applying a simple set of decision criteria and doing the due diligence for feature/product proposals first. Also include some iterations of your simple prioritization process in those cycles. Hold some retrospectives (retros) on how it’s going. You’ll learn a lot about how your prioritization process needs to evolve through those retros.

In my humble opinion, keep the process as light as possible while ensuring it still meets your needs. The goal should be to infuse more objectivity into how you are prioritizing.

What are some industry benchmarks I can use to know if we’re doing a good job or for goal setting?

I have issues with the idea of industry benchmarks because every product, market, set of users for your particular product, and use case is different.

Unless you happen to have accessible to you benchmarks from a well represented set of products that are very similar to your product, users, markets, etc., I think this may not be the best route to set you up for success.

I think the best way to use benchmarks is set your own. I know it’s a bit like the chicken or egg problem of what came first and everyone wants to skip forward and save time. However I believe, in the end I think you will have much more effective benchmarks if you first measure your baseline, and then set reasonable but challenging goals to improve from your baseline. As long as your numbers are improving and you’re learning, it’s good.

Any PM resources you’d recommend? Books to read? People to follow? How to get started learning more?

I’m going to answer honestly and be super transparent with you. I personally have not read many books or followed many people when it comes to PM topics. Perhaps it’s just my style of learning, I prefer to learn by doing and from my interactions and experiences. Also, at a point I lived and breathed so much product management stuff day to day that the last thing I wanted to do it read more about it in my off time. I much prefer learning something about the industry I’m working in or just learning something new and seeing how I can apply it to my work (or not 🙃). For this reason, I don’t like to recommend much in this area. I do not want to recommend something I haven’t personally used or gotten value from. I recognize this can be totally different for someone else and there are tons of great resources out there!

I do tend to see a bunch of stuff come up in my LinkedIn feed just because of my network so it is helpful to be connected to the PM ecosystem. I also usually just take it to a Google search or a specific person if there is some specific question I have about a particular problem, industry or technology…

That said, here are some topics you may want to look into/think about as you look to learn more, this tends to be what I go over with those I mentor/work with that are just starting out in PM-land.

List of topics for PM discipline stuff (definitely not an exhaustive list):

• Stakeholder management
• Agile
• Working with design & engineering
• Prioritization
• Product management frameworks
• KPIs, OKRs, and measurements
• Product development lifecycle
• Product Lifecycle
• MVP
• Dual-track development (balancing on-going discovery & implementation)
• Career path considerations
• Qualitative (user research & how to ask the right questions) & quantitative research (A/B testing, funnel analysis, surveys, etc.)
• Story mapping
• Brainstorming (don’t take this for granted, it’s good to have a process!)
• Product briefs

PM [reading] resources

• The Product Book from the Product School (free)
• SPVG is also a good thought group on product management, we read their book and they did some workshops for us at Spotify

You can also check out some other questions I answered in an AMA I did with the Product School a few months ago here.

I’m sure others have great thoughts as well, please let me know yours! If you’d like to see me write more of these FAQ style articles (or anything else), please let me know what questions you have. Also, if you have other great answers to these questions and feel I missed something please also add it in the comments 😊.