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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…
