Master the Art of the Product Manager 'No'
Comments
asoneth
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.
wbl
3: the fix is easy but the integration testing and deployment cannot happen without allocated time.
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."
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.
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
dgfitz
Yeah, that worked out phenomenally with US-china trade agreements!
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.
JohnMakin
I live in LA - I am born and raised, never even left the city until I was an adult - I think it’s the best place on earth, but the recent natural disaster has made up my mind for me. I’m still grieving a little in my head about it, but long suspected this day could come - my home is losing fire insurance. I’m not sure I can even sell it if the market goes into a downturn, I don’t really even have a hard decision. the question to me is, what area will weather natural disasters the best in the next 40-60 years? I don’t honestly know. I think parts of northern alaska could become pretty temperate and is reasonably cheap/undeveloped, but I have infrastructure concerns and am not so much interested in remaining in the united states.
gooseus
This is also the story of my political discourse for the last four years, and will almost certainly continue for the next four.
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."
ungreased0675
In my PM work I haven’t had an issue with being transparent with feature requests. I’ll straight up tell people “just because it’s in the backlog doesn’t mean we’ll ever do it.” Most of the time people just want to be heard. People understand you can’t build every feature that crosses the desk.
iamleppert
I had a week long argument with a PM once about preview icons appearing in a list. Although it was in a design everyone already agreed on, and I had finished implementing it, after she saw it she pushed back and said it “added no value”. I asked her to explain how she determined that, to which she said, “it adds no product value”. From that point on, I’ve hated PM’s and run them out of every company I can.
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.
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.
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.)
Terr_
Closely related, documenting examples of problems or situations the product will not try to help with is also extremely powerful.
You'd think "it does X, Y, Z, and nothing else" would be clear-enough, but in practice a blanket prohibition is too vague to have force, it's an invitation for scope creep. So saying "it will not handle W" is useful, even if it seems redundant at first glance.
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.
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?
saulpw
Great, so, what are you going to build? Whatever the engineers want to play with?
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?!!!!!!!
mystified5016
Project managers that behave this way is what's wrong with people.
flappyeagle
I had someone at work say "this is illogical" and it was great. Because we could actually come together to figure out exactly what the disagreement was. We didn't need to beat around the bush 10 times before getting to the point.
mr3martinis
This is great, can you make it into a slack app?
AcerbicZero
That’s a good thought, but let’s revisit it later
datadrivenangel
There is a difference between a hard no (We are not doing that) and this softer no (We are not doing that but we are not committed to not doing that), and in less mature organizations that difference is important and very useful.
kjellsbells
Yes, but here be dragons, especially in front of customers (B2B sales).
Sales Engineers for example are trained never to give the hard No to a customer request. Sometimes, they think they are saying no but the customer hears, "maybe". For example, "we'll consider adding that to the roadmap". Now the PM is stuck developing a single feature, the customer just got handed a stick to beat you with, and your CFO just got lumped with revenue thats unrecognize-able until some feature ships in who knows when.
code_biologist
Yep, I worked on a B2B product riddled with features that were there to make a sale. The success rate of those features converting to a sale was less than 20%, and none of those conversions were the whale clients.
The features were typically well implemented and integrated with the rest of the product, and totally unused.
The features added substantially to the complexity of the code base. It's funny to see HN defend quality over quick and dirty software. Though I understand and agree with the sentiment, the unused features were much more difficult to remove because of their "quality" (as measured in the eyes of the dev team).
ryandrake
Just thinking back, so many features I've written over my career were each done for a single sales prospect that never materialized into a sale. So much tech debt and wasted effort generated over so many years.
kerblang
People insist devs aren't stakeholders but I've heard all of these more times than I can count...
anticorporate
This encapsulates why I hated being a product manager. You become the "no" person. It's your job to kill creativity and the ideas that actually motivate people to want to work on them.
Blah blah blah the interests of the business. Fuck that. Capitalism sucks the joy out of software.
mberning
The best product manager arguments are around value. The majority of the time nobody can justify the value of implementing their ideas, economic or otherwise.
Uptrenda
These all just sound like a way to say no without owning up to it. People can tell when you're bullshitting and will feel resentment. From my perspective: it feels like you're not being listened to. I would instantly think less of anyone who used language like this (and have.) Just say you can't do something and explain why.
rqtwteye
I hope this is a parody. All of these are passive-aggressive approach to telling somebody to fuck off.
stalfosknight
What's wrong with just saying "no"?
blmarket
with "no", there might be additional reason why. But this office jargon allows you to just defer (indefinitely).
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.