What are the most common pitfalls of poor priority management?

In my experience common pitfalls of prioritization include: 1. Perceived Value versus the actual value i.e. some features/tasks seems to give you high perceived value but resulting in actual business loss in long run such as increasing the price without realizing the Risk Metrics of Stickiness 2. Not following all SMART metrics which should include Risk Metrics & Golden Metrics [Money on Table] other than Success Metrics. We often prioritize using the success Metrics & associated KPIs 3. Hypothesis Validation i.e. we often are too eager to prioritize & build things without proper hypothesis validation data driver or otherwise

-Priority Management Pitfall: Poor priority management often stems from a lack of clear and measurable goals for your product. -Direction and Progress Evaluation: Goals provide direction, evaluate progress, and communicate vision to the team and stakeholders. -SMART Goal Definition: Define Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals aligning with business strategy and customer needs. -Regular Goal Review: Periodically review and update goals to maintain relevance and realism. -Avoiding Directionless Path: Establishing and updating SMART goals ensures a purposeful and aligned product strategy, preventing a directionless path.

A lack of understanding the goals will hamstring any product. All internal stakeholders (product, engineering, leadership) should easily be able to complete the following sentence: "As a <user>, I need <product/feature> in order to <enable an improvement>." Understanding the above enables clearer goals to be established, and serve as the team's North Star. The product's purpose should be routinely evaluated to ensure the user needs have not changed (say a similar product is now available, a new technology is launched, etc.) in order to keep the goals aligned to the product's capabilities.

As a Product Leader at trampos, we embraced ruthless prioritization. We laser-focused on goals, not just features. This involved: 1. Brutal Clarity: defining clear, quantifiable goals tied to business objectives and user needs. 2. Saying no with confidence: prioritizing ruthlessly, saying no to shiny distractions that didn't directly move the needle. 3. Data-driven decisions: leveraging user feedback and analytics to validate assumptions and inform priorities. Here's what changed: 1. Focus: clarity on "what matters most" drove focused execution. 2. Speed: prioritization streamlined our decision-making, accelerating progress. 3. Impact: aligning with goals ensured every feature drove real value.

Well, a lack of clear goals is like sailing a ship without a compass. It leads to wasting your team's resources and sacrificing stakeholder's desired outcomes. To prevent this, keep your team inspired with a clear product vision, strategy, and roadmap, ensuring everyone knows what it stands for and how each contribution influences business.

It is vital to regularly engage with stakeholders and customers to refine and validate the product's objectives. Conducting quarterly goal-setting workshops with key team members ensures that goals remain aligned with evolving business strategies and market demands. This practice not only provides a clear direction but also fosters a shared understanding and commitment to these objectives, making it easier to prioritize tasks that directly contribute to achieving them, and consequently, delivering value more effectively.

Within the realm of effective leadership, a pitfall associated with poor priority management is the lack of clearly defined and measurable goals for our product. Without these, our strategic trajectory becomes uncertain, hindering our ability to gauge success and make informed decisions. Establishing specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives is key to navigating the complexities of product management with precision and foresight.

One significant mistake in poor priority management is the absence of clear, measurable product goals. This lack of direction can hinder progress evaluation and effective communication with your team and stakeholders. To avoid this issue, it's crucial to establish SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These goals should align with your business strategy and customer needs. Regularly reviewing and updating these goals ensures they remain relevant and attainable in guiding your product's direction.

Without a clear destination and milestones to guide you, the journey becomes aimless, and the crew lacks cohesion. In one of my previous roles, we learned this the hard way. We started a project without SMART goals, which led to confusion and misaligned efforts. Once we paused and defined clear, measurable, and time-bound objectives, everything changed. The team’s energy and focus improved, as did our communication with stakeholders

Lack of clear goals is a significant challenge that can impede the success of product management. This can be due to unclear direction, misalignment efforts, difficulty in prioritization, lack of accountability, lack of stakeholder buy-in etc. To address the lack of clear goals, try to prioritize goal-setting, ensuring that objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Regular communication, collaboration with stakeholders, and a commitment to refining goals based on feedback and changing circumstances are crucial for overcoming this challenge. Setting a clear vision and communicating it effectively to the entire team is essential for aligning efforts and achieving success.

As a Product Manager it’s understandable that we have a lot of priorities driven from business, stakeholders, initiatives or collaborative projects, but the main focus of a Product Manager was to make up a list of initiatives that one should prioritise our initiatives by providing a clear picture to our stakeholders and be able to get a consensus during the planning sessions. By having the right approach and strategy we should be able to manage and prioritise by validation of dependencies, acceptance of stakeholders for commitment, its not about having too many initiatives, its about of quality of the deliverables that does matter and never hesitate to reproritise things when it’s necessary.

The approach of most managers of trying to get a lot done in a short span to time to impress the senior management often backfires. The teams not only feel distressed with this burden but also feel ignored. Priority setting should be fairly minimal at first and then can be course-corrected to optimize later. Well begun is half done, so it's always best to get a little done but done to near perfection!🚀

When you navigate a ship with a precise compass, you chart a straight course through the sea. Your clear vision is your destination, your strategy is the chosen sea route, and your roadmap is the set of navigational steps. Just as a skilled captain steers clear of irrelevant islands and avoids off-course waters, with a clear vision, strategy, and roadmap, you can confidently bypass ideas that don't directly steer your product toward its goal. This approach keeps your product journey focused and efficient, ensuring all efforts are aligned and propelling the ship directly toward its intended harbor.

It's essential to regularly reassess and recalibrate your focus. Utilizing a framework like the Eisenhower matrix allows you to categorize tasks into four quadrants based on urgency and importance, helping to clarify what needs immediate attention. For example, each week I might reassess tasks to ensure that time-sensitive and high-impact activities are at the forefront. It's also beneficial to cultivate a culture where saying 'no' to lower-priority tasks is acceptable, ensuring the team's energy is directed towards activities that offer the most value.

As they say - You can do anything but you can't do everything at once. It's important to leverage say 2 List method of putting 25 goals and trim it down to 5 which are to be focused on and rest are to be forgotten. It's necessary to think of goals as well basis priorities.

Having too many priorities can hinder overall success, it can overwhelm your team productivity by having too many tasks. It can decrease or dilute a teams' focus making it challenging to make meaningful success, increased risk of burnout and also lead to strategic drift. To address this you should prioritize and streamline the list of priorities. This involves assessing the importance and urgency of each task, collaborating with stakeholders to identify key objectives, and clearly communicating the revised priorities to the team. Emphasizing effective time management, setting realistic goals, and regularly reassessing priorities based on changing circumstances can help maintain focus and improve overall productivity.

Having too many priorities at the same time is common, but not prioritizing it will decrease your productivity and efficiency. Set parameters for your products, prioritize it with those parameters and start implementing the one which is prioritized 1st

Too many priorities leads to confusion and can be seen as an inefficient priority management. RICE and MoSCoW methods are great tools but you need decide how often to revisit the priority order. For smaller agile organizations a bi-monthly review should works and for larger organizations a monthly or quarterly review might be a better option. Also a high frequency of updating priorities creates a confusion for the delivery teams

Overcommitting, infrequent reassessment of priorities, and overlooking unexpected disruptions are common pitfalls in priority management. Clear goal-setting and avoiding procrastination are also crucial for effective prioritization.

Too many priorities is the most prevalent problem caused due to poor priority management. Also even when we follow all the Rice scoring, Moscow etc there are new priorities added in the list all the time. The key is to take immediate decisions based on quick impact vs effort and alignment to the business goals and eliminate / send to the backlog that is not needed . Immediate decision making and prioritisation can essentially resolve the too many priorities problem.

Setting up regular consultation like, holding monthly priority review meetings with a diverse group of stakeholders ensures that different perspectives are considered. During these sessions, openly discussing proposed priorities, collecting feedback, and addressing concerns helps in creating a balanced and well-informed priority list. This approach fosters stakeholder buy-in and also enhances the product's relevance and success by aligning it more closely with the needs and expectations of those it serves.

In not involving stakeholders, products may not contribute strategically to the organization's goals, hindering its long-term success. It also leads to not effectively addressing user requirements, leading to a lower user satisfaction and adoption rate. Product Managers should prioritize stakeholder engagement throughout the product lifecycle. This involves identifying key stakeholders, establishing clear communication channels, and incorporating their feedback into decision-making processes. Regular updates, workshops, and collaborative sessions can help foster a sense of ownership and commitment among stakeholders, ensuring a more successful and well-supported product development process.

Involving stakeholders in the prioritization process is not just about getting feedback or managing expectations, it's also about building relationships and trust. As a product manager, I've found that stakeholders often have unique perspectives and insights that can significantly influence product direction. Furthermore, their involvement can foster a sense of ownership and commitment to the product's success, which can be invaluable in navigating challenges and driving the product forward.

Stakeholders are the ones who are impacted first by a product, so not involving them can create conditions where things don't matches the mission or goals of the stakeholders

Continuing ship's captain analogy:) So, sailing a ship without involving key crew members is like setting priorities without stakeholder input. Imagine a captain navigating without consulting the navigator, engineer, or lookout. The journey becomes risky and misdirected. Similarly, not involving stakeholders in priority management can lead to a misaligned product course. Each stakeholder holds a piece of the map; their unique perspectives, like the crew's expertise, are crucial for a smooth voyage. Without their input, you might miss critical obstacles or opportunities, leading to misplaced efforts and a product journey that might not reach the intended destination efficiently, or at all.

One common mistake in poor priority management is not including your stakeholders in the decision-making process. Stakeholders are important individuals like customers, users, executives, developers, designers, and marketers who have a stake in your product's success. Ignoring them can lead to missing out on valuable feedback and insights. To avoid this mistake, it's crucial to involve key stakeholders early and regularly seek their input. Clear communication and managing their expectations are also vital for effective priority management as a product manager.

Poor priority management can lead to various challenges and pitfalls that affect productivity, decision-making, and overall outcomes. Not involving stakeholders in priority management can lead to several significant issues that affect decision-making, alignment, and overall project success. Absence of stakeholder input can result in a misalignment between project goals and stakeholder expectations. This can lead to confusion about what truly matters to the organization and its customers.

If priorities are not aligned with the needs and expectations of stakeholders, it can result in dissatisfaction. This could be customers, higher management, or other key players who may not see the expected value or progress.

This is a Key one. Falling into the trap of untested assumptions can derail priority management. Assumptions about your product, market, or customers need evidence-based validation. Without it, you risk investing in misguided priorities or overlooking key opportunities. Counter this by grounding assumptions in data, testing them through experiments or customer feedback. Be ready to pivot your priorities if this validation uncovers new insights. It’s about being agile in your approach, ensuring you’re always on track with what truly matters.

To sidestep the pitfall of unvalidated assumptions, incorporating a rigorous validation process into the priority-setting phase is crucial. Before finalizing priorities, it is good to conduct a series of A/B tests or user interviews to gather empirical evidence supporting (or refuting) my assumptions. This ensures that decisions are grounded in reality, not just conjecture. Also, maintaining a flexible mindset allows for swift adjustments if the validation process uncovers new insights, ensuring that priorities always reflect the most current and accurate understanding of the market, customers, and product potential.

Setting product priorities without validating assumptions is like navigating a ship based on guesses. Imagine a captain who assumes the weather will always stay calm, the unknown route is safe, or the crew knows the plan without checking. This approach can lead to misadventures, like sailing into storms, encountering unexpected obstacles, or confusion among the crew. Similarly, in product management, not validating assumptions can steer priorities in the wrong direction. You might invest in features based on untested beliefs, overlook real user needs, or misjudge market trends. Just as a wise captain checks the weather and verifies the course, effective priority management requires validation to ensure the journey is on the right track.

The fourth common mistake in poor priority management is failing to confirm your assumptions before deciding on a priority. Assumptions are your beliefs about your product, market, customers, or competitors. Neglecting to validate them can lead to wasted time and resources or missed opportunities and risks. To avoid this error, rely on data and evidence to support your assumptions. Test them through experiments, prototypes, or customer feedback. Be ready to adjust your priorities based on the results of your validation process. This ensures you make informed decisions as a product manager.

Assumptions are good to start planning and initial development, as it allows a team to begin its effort, as the wait for "getting all answers" will delay a team and the products feature. Assumptions should be categorized based on the level of impact a wrong assumption will have on the product. Those with the highest negative impact need to be validated, else the product is at significant risk of failing.

To avoid the pitfall of stagnant priorities, it's essential to establish a routine for regular priority reviews. Conducting a bi-weekly review meeting can help reassess the current priorities in light of new data, market shifts, or feedback. This routine ensures that priorities remain dynamic and aligned with the most recent understanding of the business landscape. Using a dashboard to track key metrics related to each priority helps quantify their impact and informs any necessary adjustments.

Most hard work often goes unnoticed, unreviewed or scrapped after some time amidst too many things on the to-do list and constantly changing dynamics.🏴☠️ Clear priorities and their associated goals should have dedicated team members to ensure they do not fizzle out after a while.📈 Reviewing the progress on these tasks and activities not only helps keep the project on track but facilitates better communication by getting everyone on the same page. 📃

As a product manager, regularly reviewing priorities is crucial. This ensures alignment with dynamic factors like market trends, customer feedback, and competitor actions. Without regular updates, you risk focusing on outdated tasks and missing new opportunities. Regular reviews allow for adjustments based on fresh data and insights. It's also important to measure the impact of your priorities with relevant metrics, ensuring they contribute effectively to your business goals. This approach keeps your efforts relevant and impactful.

Monitor and adjust. The teams that fail to meet their commitments tend to stop saying “What can we realistically achieve in the next {two weeks, product increment}?” … and then rigorously check progress to that milestone. Typically that requires throwing off ballast, extending the deadline or increasing velocity (e.g., adding team members, removing impediments). This monitoring and adjusting almost implicitly carries [re]prioritization since the development team, management and/or customer must agree on which lever to pull (e.g., “Let’s postpone <this> item.”).

The main difference between a Project Manager and a Product Manager is the ability to say 'No'. During a recent activity, one of our stakeholders suggested a change in the marketing execution which we planned. Though this would bring about a short term profit but in the longer run if forgotten, could lead to a severe business loss. After providing valid data pointers and arguments, we rejected the plan. As a product manager your job is to align everyone to the same goal and have positive relations with everyone, but in a team where there are various thought processes involved there can come a time where ideas and suggestions overflow. At that time its essential to see the greater picture and focus on the priority elements.

In my roles as Chief Product Officer and Global Vice President of Product I’ve learned that saying ‘no’ is not just about rejection, it’s about protecting your product’s vision. Every ‘yes’ to a non-aligned feature is a ‘no’ to your strategic goals. It’s a tough part of the job, but crucial. I will always try to explain the ‘why’ behind each ‘no’, offering alternatives that align better with our objectives. This approach keeps the team focused and prevents us from straying into unproductive territories. It’s not just about saying no, but about guiding your product faithfully towards its true north.

In the B2B SaaS context, it can be tough to say no to the sales team. However, it's essential to keep our focus on addressing backlog items that bring the most value to our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) rather than catering to individual client requests. If we say yes to every client, we risk becoming more of a software house than a scalable SaaS company. It's important to make sure the sales team's motivations are aligned correctly. While they provide valuable insights to product managers, sometimes their requests might not fit into the big picture and could lead to short-term thinking

Avoiding the sixth pitfall of poor priority management, particularly for a product manager, involves confidently saying no to requests that don't align with your product goals. You'll often face pressure from various stakeholders like customers or executives, who may push for unrealistic features or deadlines. Saying yes to these can harm your product's quality, scope, or value. Assertively saying no, while explaining your rationale and considering trade-offs, helps maintain focus on your product's vision and strategy. It's also crucial to propose alternatives that meet the core needs behind these requests.

The hardest skill for a Product Management professional to learn is properly saying "no". It's our job to prioritize what features are a "must have" versus a "nice to have", to drive decision making and development. However, bluntly saying "no" will likely cause friction with members key to the product's success (i.e. users, customers, stakeholders), so a deft hand is required when politely indicating the idea is not feasible. This is where the communication capability of the individual is key - providing an answer that resonates with the recipient ensures there is clear understanding the request was heard, and properly acted upon, which increases the likelihood of further input from the individual being told "no" this time.

Imagine everyone asking you for favors, knowing you'll always say yes. This might seem helpful, but soon you'll be overloaded and resentful. Similarly, not saying no to requests that don't align with your priorities leads to burnout, resentment and missed opportunities.

From my experience, some repercussions of these common pitfalls are: 1. Unmet Goals: Poor priority management can lead to neglecting crucial tasks, resulting in missed deadlines and hindering overall progress. 2. Stress: Failing to prioritize effectively often leads to feeling overwhelmed, causing stress and making it challenging to focus on any specific task. 3. Decrease in Quality of Work: When priorities are not managed well, there's a risk of rushing through tasks, compromising the quality of your work in the process. 4. Strained Relationships: Poor priority management may cause delays in responding to colleagues or clients as well as resentful feelings from the project team, leading to strained professional relationships.

I believe one major thing that product managers miss while prioritising their activities is accounting for edge cases and production issues. Follow a 80:20 rule while prioritising your issues in which leave the 20% of your bandwidth for edge cases and production issues and prioritise the development activities in the 80% of your bandwidth. This cushion becomes very important as one scales up from an MVP to a fully functional product roadmap.

Most common pitfall I have seen is management getting distracted by new things , chasing after shiny objects, getting lured by new ideas and diverting attention from current priorities, hindering progress on existing priorities.

When discussing priorities it’s also important to differentiate between opportunities in one area (e.g. “let users share the music they love with their friends”) and solutions in another (e.g. “add a like button to songs”). The two are not on the same level, as an opportunity might has many potential solutions, and therefore cannot be evaluated effectively against each other.

Poor priority management in ML and DS products at big tech companies can lead to: Delayed Model Deployment: If prioritization neglects production readiness, a company like Netflix might face delays in deploying updated recommendation models, impacting user experience. Ineffective Resource Allocation: Google's Cloud AI product could suffer if resources are misallocated, hampering the development of critical features and hindering the platform's competitiveness. Overlooking Data Quality: Amazon's Alexa may encounter issues if poor priority management neglects data quality improvements, resulting in inaccurate voice recognition models and degraded performance.

Agree with Hanna. Not only are there different “feature animals”, but they likely support different product strategies (sharing feature for growth strategy, value increase with likes feature through personalization)

Time is the most precious asset in Product - the development team is able to work on one thing at a time, and if they are working on a feature that as important as something else, then their time is not being properly used, and the result is lost time that cannot be recouped. When prioritizing, think "what is the most important thing we need to do now, and how will that impact what we do next sprint" and ensure the prioritization matches this. Avoiding the pitfalls listed above helps provide the rationale a Product Manager needs to justify how the engineering time is being used, and allows them to articulate to all stakeholders why the team is focusing on their current stories/tasks.

Poor priority management can be a major obstacle for any product manager, leading to wasted resources, missed deadlines, and frustrated stakeholders. Here are some of the most common pitfalls to watch out for: 1. Lack of clear goals and objectives:Without a clear roadmap and measurable goals, it's easy to get sidetracked by every shiny new idea or urgent request. Define SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) for your product and use them to guide your prioritization decisions. 2. Feature overload and scope creep: Adding features is tempting, but it can quickly bloat your product and dilute its core value proposition.

Technical debt and NFR’s are often left out of a process or scored low, if they not scored properly will leave you with a shiny which does not scale and or run at all! Common in sales led organisations. Watch out for these and ensure your product can power the glitter.