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Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'

asoneth

There are many kinds of "negative" responses:

0. This idea is bad.

1. This idea is probably bad, but if someone wants to put together a more compelling argument we will discuss it at a future meeting.

2. This idea needs to be more fully developed before we can decide whether it is good or bad.

3. This idea is probably good, but it will remain in backlog limbo until someone makes a compelling argument that it is a priority.

4. This idea is good, and while it is not a high-enough priority to displace our current tasks, we will actively discuss including it when we plan our next sprint/release.

Depending on who you work with these may need to be gussied up with manager-speak to let people save face or to prevent people from hijacking the agenda to turn the meeting into a brainstorming session. But treating all of them as synonymous with "no" loses useful nuance.

ryandrake

In most companies I've worked, in order to actually implement an idea, you need to prove a few things, whether the person proposing it is the PM, an engineer, or any other person involved in the product:

1. The idea is technically feasible

2. The idea aligns with company's business goals

3. The idea is our team's responsibility and cannot be done by another team

4. The idea is more important than the other things our team plans to work on in the future

5. The idea is more time critical than the other things our team is working on now

If any of these cannot be proven, then it goes on the backlog as a P4 and nobody realistically will ever look at it. It's just the reality of corporate software building. There are always 10-50x more ideas than there are staff/time to work on.

Of course, all five of those can be, and often are, overridden by the Prime Directive:

0. One of the executives (often one of your grand-bosses high up on the totem pole) wants it.

p1necone

In my experience the more fine grained an organizations issue tracking/planning is the more this is a problem vs a reasonable process.

If you have to convince someone of all of those things in order to build some reasonably large thing over the space of a few weeks, that's probably reasonable.

If you have to convince someone of all of those things in order to allocate a few hours to fixing some tech debt or minor bug then your codebase is going to slowly deteriorate until the same someone is asking you why there's so many bugs and everything takes so long to develop.

elevatedastalt

Usually most engineers have some slack time and can pick things up to fix. The problem is not in them doing that. The issues arrises in one of two things—

[1] They either use the fact that they are fixing that thing as an excuse to not work on or deliver on time a different, more important task. If that happens, obvious questions about prioritization occur.

[2] They want a substantial amount of credit or recognition for doing it. Usually such fixes don't receive exec attention (since execs are tracking more important projects) and so don't get the same due as a properly tracked project does.

Dylan16807

If it meets 1-4 does it get forgotten or does someone reliably come back to check for 5 becoming true?

joshuanapoli

Probably the person who came up with the idea remains the most invested in it, and they should to watch for number 5 “the right moment” to bring it up again.

psunavy03

Or you work at a non-software company where the technical folks ultimately report to a non-technical boss, or are outnumbered by nontechnical executives. In which case, there's the real danger of a bunch of 0 getting shoved down your collective throat to the tune of "it's all a priority, get it done."

ghaff

At a higher level, does the revenue it could result in be enough to move the needle and therefore be worth the attention up and down and across the management chain (to the degree it's a discrete program)?

giancarlostoro

"Add it to the backlog for review, we're not saying it'll be done, but it will at least be looked at an considered when we have bandwidth"

Just be direct and realistic. If it's to a customer, "we'll add it to our backlog for review" and tag it as customer suggestion so it doesn't just sit there forever.

cwbrandsma

You forgot: Engineering is requesting this. So no.

gopalv

This sort of advice is parodied in "Yes, Prime Minister" as the 4 step strategy for "crisis management"

1: Don't worry, nothing's going to happen.

2: Something may be happen but we should wait and see

3: Maybe we should do something about it, but there is no clear action

4: Maybe there was something we could've done, but it's too late now

Stringing along a bunch of people who think they are being heard and listened to when you are not is a morale killer when the tide goes out & we see who's been swimming naked.

roenxi

The Yes, Prime Minister advice is different. That 4-stage formula is for ignoring a crisis. The PM's No is advocating for working on tickets in priority order which will result in following the plan under a remarkably large number of situations. The two major differences are firstly that the YPM steps don't involve priorities at any stage. And secondly, the PM's No is a straightforward but a polite way of pointing out that the work being asked for is very low priority and so is unlikely to ever get time assigned to it.

senkora

The delivery in "Yes, Prime Minister" is very good. Here's the clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSD1d-6P6qI

JohnMakin

On climate change, are we somewhere between step 3 and 4? It sure looks a lot that way to me. Maybe closer to 4 soon. That conversation is exhausting, or kind of the inverse of this, overwhelming confidence in the success of future technologies that do not really exist yet.

caminante

Re: climate change, what can the US and other actors do for "support" when China's still at Yes Minister step 1? China's the biggest emitter and doesn't care. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

rat87

Start by not doing

But China on global warming

Second step do more as a country

Third step try to shame or encourage China and other countries into doing more

The US is still in the lead for total emissions historically and has a higher emissions per person. If it ignores it's responsibility it makes it very easy for China not to mention India or other lower total emissions countries to do the same.

China is doing something if not enough. The goal should not be trying to find a way to avoid responsibility because that's how you get all countries to avoid doing anything. The point is too keep pushing all countries starting with yours to to more

Etheryte

I think whether you're at 3 or 4 depends largely on what latitude you live at. I have many colleagues who are seriously considering moving because the weather is getting too extreme where they're at. Meanwhile people in mellower climates don't even see there's a problem, they're happy there's somewhere warm they can take a holiday in the cold months.

gooseus

This is also the story of my political discourse for the last four years, and will almost certainly continue for the next four.

Terr_

[delayed]

jewayne

Just because something is objectively a great idea, doesn't mean it's a great idea FOR YOUR ORGANIZATION. In fact, I've definitely been a part of an organization whose biggest problem was the inability to say no to objectively great ideas.

idopmstuff

"Please fill out the feature request form - that will create a ticket." Mark ticket P4.

In all seriousness, the best thing is to have management that clearly communicates what the high level company goals are on a quarterly (or whatever cadence is appropriate for your business) basis. People don't like to hear no, but they understand "the main objective for the quarter is to close $X in new deals in Y market segment, and since this isn't going to directly contribute to that, it's not going to be a priority in the near future."

baazaa

I work in government and middle-management morons are continually pushing for the dopiest projects imaginable (e.g. we have no good data and everyone who can fix this is being told they should work on AI instead which will query the data - data we don't have - so analysts don't have to learn SQL).

One reason they persist in their insanity is everyone is an expert in giving excuses why their own team is too tied up with work to assist. Sure this reduces conflict over telling middle-management why their ideas are stupid, but in the long-run it's detrimental to the organisation to avoid explicitly hashing-out disagreements. Creating a culture where everyone lies to avoid hurting one another's feelings is not good.

extr

I don't even really feel like this is a PM-specific trait. The best engineers I know stay focused on immediate priorities and what needs to happen to see particular outcomes. The worst PMs I know derail meetings with suggestions/changes/tweaks with dubious ROI.

make3

Prioritization is the #1 thing (I feel like this is a tautological statement). Spending a million hours doing something useless is just so obviously bad and expensive.

kylecazar

In the smoothest operation I've worked at thus far, teams were instructed not to even try to mess with already planned priorities and work.

Food for thought, don't make someone say no as often.

karaterobot

I kind of wish the answer would just be "no, we're not doing that". The lines in this website all strike me as a way to toy with people's expectations. If I had an idea, and presented it, and a PM told me "let’s keep this in mind for future consideration" or anything like that, I'd either take them at their word, or not. If I take them at their word, I'll either keep believing my input was considered valuable, and that we'll actually return to the idea later, then feel it all the harder when it never gets mentioned again. Or, I'll understand that the PM is lying to me, and I'll lose trust in them. I get that, at some level, this website is a joke, but I think you owe it to teammates to be polite but honest, friendly but frank.

davidgerard

Are you in the US? In UK companies, everything from that bot is somewhere between "no" and "no, fuck off". The more qualifiers you add, the ruder you're intending to be.

pm_details

The PM: "practice radical candor!" The PM the very next week: "Let’s gather more data before moving forward"

In practice, there is no easier way to annoy these types than by taking these platitudes at face value. Don't go gathering the data.

(I get why this style of communication has become common in business settings, especially in large orgs. It still rubs me the wrong way.)

barryvan

I'm a PM and I assumed that this was parody at first. I've been guilty of using terms like this with customers ("Not something we can do at the moment, but certainly something to think about down the track."), but always with a sense of discomfort -- or an attempt to make it clear that it's a "nice no".

Inside a company, I don't think there should be space for these sorts of responses. I can see these only being necessary/used where people are disenfranchised and not involved in setting or understanding the overall product priorities. But then I've always seen the PM's prioritisation role more as an expert mediator than a dictator...

writtenAnswer

I mean, what do you expect from AI generated responses LOL. It is literally from some BS article from some dude who has never been a successful Product Manager.

I think its a funny website to browse and say "haha", but nothing more.

barryvan

Ah -- I missed that it was AI-generated! That being the case, you're not wrong.

7thpower

You’re not at work, don’t be so agreeable! Tell them it’s a great article and the author would have time to write their own if they weren’t so busy having to explain things to those damned engineers.

gatkinso

How about a "no" to having product managers?

gorfian_robot

Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!! I have people skills!! I am good at dealing with people!!! Can't you understand that?!? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!!!!!!!