When teams constantly struggle with prioritization, the root cause isn't poor backlog management. It's a failure of upstream strategic filters like market segmentation, pricing, and product discovery. Without these filters, the feature list becomes an unmanageable mess of competing demands.
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Instead of choosing between diverse user segments, GitHub defines success with extreme clarity. This allows them to treat prioritization like an investment portfolio, allocating dedicated squads to different user needs (e.g., open-source maintainers vs. enterprise admins) to achieve a balanced outcome.
The tension between growth and profitability is best resolved by understanding your product's "runway" (be it 6 months or 6 years). This single piece of information, often misaligned between teams and leadership, should dictate your strategic focus. The key task is to uncover this true runway.
Instead of complex prioritization frameworks like RICE, designers can use a more intuitive model based on Value, Cost, and Risk. This mirrors the mental calculation humans use for everyday decisions, allowing for a more holistic and natural conversation about project trade-offs.
When a product team is busy but their impact is minimal or hard to quantify, the root cause is often not poor execution but a lack of clarity in the overarching company strategy. Fixing the high-level strategy provides the focus necessary for product work to create meaningful value.
Figma learned that removing issues preventing users from adopting the product was as important as adding new features. They systematically tackled these blockers—often table stakes features—and saw a direct, measurable improvement in retention and activation after fixing each one.
Organizations suffer from an excess of priorities, a modern phenomenon since the word was originally singular. To restore focus, use the "hell yes" test: if a new initiative doesn't elicit an enthusiastic "hell yes" from stakeholders, it's not a true priority and should be dropped or postponed.
Avoid the trap of building features for a single customer, which grinds products to a halt. When a high-stakes customer makes a specific request, the goal is to reframe and build it in a way that benefits the entire customer base, turning a one-off demand into a strategic win-win.
When pursuing a long-term strategic solution, dedicate product management time to high-level discovery and partner alignment first. This doesn't consume engineering resources, allowing the dev team to remain focused on mitigating the immediate, more visceral aspects of the problem.
Instead of debating individual features, establish a clear "perspective" for your product. Artist's perspective as a "push-based product for quick insights" makes it easy to reject requests that don't align, like building an in-house video hosting tool. This aligns the entire organization and simplifies the roadmap.
The misconception that discovery slows down delivery is dangerous. Like stretching before a race prevents injury, proper, time-boxed discovery prevents building the wrong thing. This avoids costly code rewrites and iterative launches that miss the mark, ultimately speeding up the delivery of a successful product.
