How To Say No Like A Product Manager

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are” — Steve Jobs

There is a misconception among new product managers — heck, even some experienced ones — that the job of a product manager requires us to agree to everything that is proposed to us, either from the customer or from internal stakeholders, without passing it through a filter called common sense in the first place.

In fact, the opposite is usually true. As a product manager, it is your responsibility to cultivate focus in your team on the few initiatives that you know make strategic sense to accomplishing your company and product vision in the short to long term. In order to cultivate this focus, however, it is important that the product manager is able to say no to all the other initiatives that the team could be undertaking and completing, in order to say yes to the initiatives the team should be undertaking for the good of the product and the company.

Saying ‘no’ is probably one of the hardest things a product manager can do, no matter where they are in their career lifecycle at the moment. It’s never easy to look the customer in the eye and tell them that their issues or ideas will not be prioritised in the short to long term. It’s even harder when it’s an executive level internal stakeholders — think CEO and the board — that makes a request which needs to be put to the side so that your team can focus on more important initiatives in the mean time.

Below are ways to make saying ‘no’ much easier for yourself and for those that you are saying ‘no’ to:

One method of helping to discern when and why you should be saying ‘no’ to a particular pain point, issue or opportunity is by…

Related posts:

When I started learning about what defines a good unit test, an important concept to remember was that good unit tests should be isolated and that the goal of a single unit test is to verify that a…