Dueling Goals

Context

PMs are struggling to prioritize due to multiple competing demands. Perhaps there are annual OKRs for the company or for product; then there are short-term demands from sales and other groups. There may be true emergency projects, as well as new executive-sponsored initiatives. The PM already has a backlog of their own product work. There may be some committed items on the roadmap. And quite possibly, there are annual individual goals as part of an HR-led performance management program.

Discussion

Sounds...more or less normal. In every context there are competing demands on a PM, and this is nothing new. Many PMs can handle this, but from time to time a PM starts to spin in the face of this situation. They might throw up their hands and refuse to priortize or update their roadmap. They might declare that forward movement and goal-setting is impossible due to churn and simply make reactive decisions each sprint. (This might be the best option that they have!)

It's common for CPOs and heads of product to ignore this problem, or set some vague, hand-waving priorities. ("Operational Excellence"). After all, we expect PMs to prioritize. It's their job. But when a PM stops prioritizing, stops doing their job in this regard, their team quickly becomes overwhelmed with too much demand and productivity drops.

So as Head of Product, you need to provide guidance.

Play

Provide PMs with clear prioritization scheme and an algorithm for working with competing goals.

Most product groups benefit from shared priorities at 3 different timescales. For example:

• 3-5 major priorities for the next 3-5 years
• 3-5 goals for the current year - ideally closely linked to the companywide goals or OKRs
• 3-5 goals for the current quarter (i.e. rocks or OKRs) for product + engineering)

(This idea comes from Verne Harnish, and we also discussed it in the Foraging for Strategy play).

In addition to these, each PM may have 6-18 month objectives for their own area that align with their roadmap.

Then, a PM needs to be able to reason about how to balance these different objectives against each other. It helps to discuss this with the whole team and agree on the algorithm. Here's an example algorithm one organization might use: