Plays

Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. Before you take action or applying other plays, ask yourself, “Am I asphyxiating? Am I being buried alive? Am I suffering self-induced overload?”

The ideal context for this play is a financially savvy company struggling with product prioritization conversations that are emotional, anecdote-driven, and intuitive.

You want to roll out a change, but that change involves other humans who have other things in mind.

You have a lot of offerings in your product portfolio and your spending on them is based on a mixture of tradition, emotion, and advocacy.

There is no single set of strategic documents. The PMs are struggling to prioritize, or make prioritization decisions in conflict with each other.

The roadmap is full of dates with unknown origins. Engineering is complaining about shifting priorities. PMs are surprised by and complaining about dependencies. PMs are barely keeping up with sprint planning and not providing their teams with a mid- or long-term view.

Does your team ignore written messages? Get in the habit of making quick videos, not more than 7 minutes.

Form product councils for each of your main product areas. Hold a monthly, 90 minute meeting with 5-20 stakeholders where you share progress, present priorities, get feedback, and build buy-in all at once.

Use a User Story Map as a negotiation tool with the team to figure out what your product increments will be.

Context Most product leaders have packed calendars, and this can mean it’s hard to find time for quick, spontaneous conversations - especially with other product people who are equally busy. And as organizations scale, it’s harder to rely on scheduled checkins to connect with all of the people you might

The classic problem with MoSCoW prioritization is that you end up with too many Must Have items, and the PM gets stuck, unable to prioritize them.

Book an hour on Thursday or Friday for the team to meet. Don’t have an agenda, don’t try to lead the discussion, and don’t collect action items. Simply talk informally about whatever comes up, like a Quaker meeting.

For companies that deliver 10-30 features per quarter across a handful of development teams, PMs will have different intuitions about what matters. Using a structured approach to align their intuitive perceptions might help.

A full calendar creeps up on you. It wasn’t until I became a product manager that I started to have weeks with 20 or 30 hours of meetings. As I started to lead other PMs it got worse. Soon, I was working nights and weekends to try to catch up

A good PM is also like a hunting dog, with a keen sense of smell for what the company expects of them. If the company just wants more and more features, how do we convince PMs to move out of feature factory mode?