As a product manager, when you have a great idea it can be frustrating at times to have to justify doing it 🙂 You can have a brilliant feature that you think everyone would love but the reality is Product Management isn’t a case of fulfilling your dreams and desires. Knowing the numbers and being able to justify the reasons why you want to do something is critical and easily overlooked in the desire to get things going. How much will it cost, how long will it take, how many users will it impact, what metric does it change.
Sometimes it’s easy. A very very poor NPS score with scathing user reviews is an easy sell. The consequences of NOT doing it speak for themselves. I’ve witnessed this first hand and having the data to prioritise the fixes in the right areas has been invaluable. Tools like Hotjar have been amazing to understand user behaviour and pinpoint where problems are happening with the data to evidence.. Other times it requires a lot more effort and research to quantify why you want to do something.
One of the biggest challenges is getting the right balance of effort to value. A small task that addresses a simple UX quirk can easily get out of hand. Sometimes processes in software development are a “one size fits all” and are not optimised for expediting small or simple changes. The administrative efforts to get little things delivered can often outweigh the effort to make the change itself and the value that the change brings, leaving you thinking, is it worth even bothering!
So:
- Know your numbers. Be ready to justify your decisions to do or NOT do a feature if questioned. Gut instincts DO work – but only you know your gut!
- Don’t boil the ocean over simple things.
- Challenge processes that don’t work well
