Product Managers are often bombarded with requests, suggestions, ideas from internal stakeholders. Everyone from execs, marketing, sales, customer success, engineers, to other PMs are often eager to share ideas that they believe should be prioritized on the roadmap. Unfortunately, PMs have to work with limited resources. As such, much of our jobs requires unrelenting prioritization and saying “No” often. One of the ways I’ve fielded requests and been able to set proper priorities is by asking “What happens if we don’t do this?”
This question should only be used with internal stakeholders and not external customers. In addition, this question should be asked only after understanding and acknowledging the request with empathy.
Why ask “what happens if we don’t do this?“
It cuts through the noise
When a new request is made, an immediate reaction is to ask Why should we do this? This is a logical response for almost any request as it quickly sheds light on the value proposition. However, what happens if you’ve got two features with equally compelling value propositions but only enough resources to focus on one? Asking what happens if we don’t do X? will most often reveal the higher priority item.
On one of my projects, an engineer kept bringing up a particular feature that she felt had been sitting in the backlog and overlooked for so long. During our grooming and sprint planning sessions, this particular issue was always categorized as a lower priority tech debt issue. 10-15% was allocated to tech debt cleanup work each sprint. There was always a fire to put out each release that the ticket never made its way to the top priorities list.
Eventually, during our sprint planning session, I asked the question to understand what her concerns would be if this issue was never prioritized. It turns out that at her last company, a similar issue was observed resulting in memory leaks and frequent crashes for a small but loud group of customers. This resulted in bad reviews and subsequently, poor sales. After my conversation with her, I looked at our analytics for that particular signature and she was right. A small percentage of our customers were suffering in silence. Thankfully, the issue wasn’t prevalent enough to cause any noticeable business impact.
I bubbled this up to the rest of the team and prioritized that issue over another for the upcoming sprint.
It brings the requestor along
Displaying empathy is a critical requirement for a product manager. It’s very easy to forget to do that as we always have much to do and not enough time. When a request is made, suggestion is provided, or an idea is shared, the PM should aim to understand and acknowledge the request first. If the request doesn’t seem like a priority or fit into the roadmap, ask the requestor What happens if we don’t do this? Notice the emphasis on “we” in the question. By asking this question, you bring the requestor along and involve that person in the process.
Asking this question allows the requestor to think through and brainstorm scenarios with you. If this request is a nice-to-have, the requestor will arrive at that conclusion more often than not. When this happens, it works out well as you don’t have to outrightly turn the person down or be the nay-sayer.
More importantly, if the request is a must-have, you’ll know it too. Asking What happens if we don’t do it? forces the requestor to articulate any grave or dire concerns not having such requested feature will cause. As a PM who knows your stuff, you should be able to suss out or research if such concerns have merit.
You close tickets 🙂
For every product that has launched and gained some traction, there is a huge backlog of unresolved tickets trailing behind. I’ve been through a couple of backlog purges resulting from new engineering management or new company initiative. Backlog purges are great because it feels like a fresh start and who doesn’t like a fresh start?
When the rare opportunity of a backlog purge presents itself, I open each ticket and ask my favorite question – What happens if we don’t do this?
Asking this question isn’t limited to software or hardware product management. It is applicable to many aspects of life. It’s a great question to ask when you want to declutter, re-strategize and prioritize what’s truly important to you.
Liked the post and think someone else will? Please share 😃
