You're facing urgent feature requests with no long-term value. How can you prioritize effectively?
When urgent feature requests threaten to derail your roadmap, prioritizing is key. Here's how to stay on track:
- Evaluate the impact: Weigh the request against your product's vision and goals.
- Communicate transparently: Discuss with stakeholders the pros and cons of prioritizing short-term gains.
- Seek consensus: Involve your team in decision-making to balance urgency and value.
How do you manage competing priorities in your product development? Share your strategies.
You're facing urgent feature requests with no long-term value. How can you prioritize effectively?
When urgent feature requests threaten to derail your roadmap, prioritizing is key. Here's how to stay on track:
- Evaluate the impact: Weigh the request against your product's vision and goals.
- Communicate transparently: Discuss with stakeholders the pros and cons of prioritizing short-term gains.
- Seek consensus: Involve your team in decision-making to balance urgency and value.
How do you manage competing priorities in your product development? Share your strategies.
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When urgent feature requests lack long-term value, I prioritize by weighing them against our product vision and goals. I assess short-term benefits, like addressing immediate customer needs, versus potential disruption to our roadmap. I engage stakeholders to understand urgency and explore alternatives. If we proceed, I ensure it doesn't derail our core strategy. My focus is balancing quick wins with long-term product value, making informed decisions that serve both immediate needs and our overall direction.
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If the urgent feature requests have no long-term value then communicate this very clearly with the stakeholders. At times, the stakeholders don't understand the overall context and want something fancy immediately. As a product manager, you must ensure that the stakeholders understand the product vision very well. Once they understand the vision, you will be able to logically explain to them the product roadmap and how it leads to the vision. Any sudden changes in the roadmap will impact the delivery of the planned releases at the cost of features that are not going to add value.
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1. Since the urgent requests do not align with the long term vision goals, they should be postponed or rejected. 2. Assessing the impact of the urgent requests - if the impact of the urgent requests is quite high and can bring significant advantage irrespective of the long term vision, its good to pick them based on WSJF. 3. Open communication - Openly discussing these concerns with stakeholders can bring a sense of satisfaction for all the parties after agreement on common grounds and ease the trouble based on the priorities.
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As long as you're building a product, and not a bespoke service or custom application, "no long term value" is exactly the same phrase as "not on the roadmap." Instead of trying to do things which shouldn't be done, work with the people who are making misinformed requests to understand what problems they genuinely want to solve. They may be striving for a competitive posture (they have it, we need it), or they may intend the feature to solve a valuable problem but not realize (a) the problem is already solved in other ways or (b) the problem is intentionally excluded from the scope of the product.
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- When dealing with urgent feature requests that lack long-term value, I prioritize effectively by first assessing each request’s impact on current user needs and business goals. I evaluate the urgency and potential short-term benefits versus the long-term product vision. - For example, if a request addresses a pressing customer issue but doesn’t align with our strategic goals, I might address it with a quick fix while documenting it for future review. - I communicate with stakeholders to explain the prioritization strategy, ensuring they understand the focus on long-term value. This approach helps balance immediate needs with overall product direction. This way, we address immediate needs without compromising long-term value.
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