post

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Customer Research

Hardware

Digital Transformation

Our Privacy Policy is changing on April 5, 2022 - for more information and a description of the updates, <a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/privacy/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">see the policy here.</a>

Switching back the focus from ‘Build only’ to ‘Build-measure-learn’

Product career special part 2: Making a change

Build what matters with vision-led product management

Lessons in fearless leadership

Building a product organisation from scratch by Kevin Mansfield

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Product Management

The executive product leader persona

Test blog post

Andres is a freelance writer and digital marketer with a background in engineering and a keen interest in the latest technology advancements. He currently helps tech companies and startups tell their stories by turning their complex ideas into easy to understand material. You can reach out to him on LinkedIn

Andres Phillips

<p>In this <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/mtpcon/digital/apac/">#mtpcon Digital APAC session</a></span>, Product Leadership Consultant <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mironov.com/">Rich Mironov</a></span> explains how to prioritize ticket requests and define a strategy for dealing with misaligned stakeholders within an organization. As Rich points out, requests can come in various categories with different <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/category/product-management-metrics-and-kpis/">metrics</a></span> and rationales. It’s, therefore, up to product managers to figure out a way to align those requests.</p>
<p>Watch the session in full or read on for the highlights.</p>
<h2>Prioritizing with buckets</h2>
<p>With the various requests that come into a JIRA ticket system, it can be tempting to take out a spreadsheet, start assigning numbers of priority, and knocking them out one by one. But as Rich points out, this method won’t yield good results as it’s hard to rank-order unlike items since they have different units and the units of ROI are different.</p>
<p>“Instead of trying to match, unlike things, I’m going to suggest that what we want to do is we want to create three or four buckets or slices or categories where similar things are compared,” he says. For example, grouping deal-specific vs. single customer requests or creating another category for validation and discovery experiments.</p>
<h2>Software investment proposal</h2>
<p>Rich suggests breaking down items into categories that showcase where engineering money is being spent. He illustrates this:</p>
<ul>
<li>Green:</strong> What users see (E.g., Visible features, UX, upsells, new markets)</li>
<li>Red: What must be done to stay in business (E.g., quality fixes, scalability, security)</li>
<li>Gray: Special requests to come in to close a deal (E.g., Things not on the roadmap, unplanned, deal-driven changes)</li>
<li>Blue: An area for validation that is not a big slice but still important</li>
</ul>
<p>By separating items into categories such as this, you can develop a strategy before assigning tickets.</p>
<h2>What each side wants</h2>
<p>Every organization suffers from some form of misalignment among stakeholders. The reason being that each department looks at things through a different lens based on their own wants and needs. As Rich explains, sales have recency bias, and their metric is based on current-quarter revenue. Marketing is focused on small numbers of large customers, headline features, and benefits, and their metric is based on top-of-the-funnel interest.</p>
<p>Support is focused on reported issues, and their metric is reduced tickets and outages, whereas engineering is focused on tech debt and architecture, and their metric is smoother development. For executives, Rich references his own time as a CEO. He mentions their “lens is deep recency bias; it’s the last phone call from the last angry customer. The metric tends to be, except with very seasoned executives, can we close today’s large deal today? We’ll worry about how to do it tomorrow.”</p>
<p>Each stakeholder group will push to make their slice of the pie bigger because they measure it differently. However, as a product manager, it’s crucial to remember we’re never just one feature away, and another approach is needed.</p>
<h2>What to do?</h2>
<p>Involve stakeholders in trade-offs and get help prioritizing the most relevant tickets for each stakeholder. Create a work in progress (WIP) spreadsheet and explain to stakeholders why their current request can’t be prioritized first because it’s not enough to have everything listed on a spreadsheet.</p>
<p>The key takeaways from this session are that as a product manager, you need to find ways to reorganize each group’s bias, get executive agreement for explicit allocation and find ways for stakeholders to help prioritize by sharing the burden of so many requests and trade-offs.</p>
<h2>More on stakeholder management</h2>
<p>Discover more <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/category/stakeholder-management/">Stakeholder Management</a></span> content on Mind the Product — we&#8217;ve got a whole library on the topic! You can also <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/tag/mtpcon/">browse our library of #mtpcon keynotes </a></span>or use our <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/content-a-z/">Content A-Z</a></span> to explore even more product management topics.</p>
<div class="g g-21"><div class="g-single a-93"><a class="gofollow" data-track="OTMsMjEsMSw2MA==" href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/product-management-training/public-workshops/communication-alignment-workshop/"><img decoding="async" src="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Training-CA-layer-of-strategy-FOOTER-scaled.jpg" /></a></div></div>

core/freeform

Stakeholder Management

How to navigate tricky work relationships

Managing misaligned stakeholders

How Influential Leadership Builds Winning Products – Oluwatobi Otokiti

MTP Prioritised : AMA with Ken Norton

The Magic in Conflict by Shaun Russell

Stuck in the Middle: Mastering Stakeholder Management by Emily Tate

The Mindset of Empowerment by Laura Scanga

Setting up Your Product Team for Success by Gareth Owen

Popular Misconceptions of the Product Craft by Sherif Mansour

Failure is Yours, Success Belongs to the Team by Tessa Cooper

ProductTank Krakow

ProductTank Heidelberg

ProductTank NYC

Product Leadership Course

ProductTank Recife

ProductTank Dublin

ProductTank London

ProductTank Birmingham

Member AMA: Unpacking User Research with Laura Klein

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Copenhagen

Trainer-Led Workshops

ProductTank Tauranga

World Product Day

Member AMA with Ken Norton

ProductTank Tallinn

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Abu Dhabi

ProductTank Oslo

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Brussels

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Brno

ProductTank Cardiff

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Bucharest

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Atlanta

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Palo Alto

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Tel Aviv-Yafo

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Dubai

ProductTank Madison

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Brisbane

ProductTank Bonn

ProductTank Des Moines

#mtpcon London+EMEA 2022 Workshops

#mtpcon London+EMEA 2022 Conference

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Köln