Saying No

**Petra Wille** (0:04)
Hi folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Wille and Teresa Torres. And we're so happy you're here.

**Teresa Torres** (0:17)
Hey Petra, I know one of the hardest things for young product manager to learn, or even a mature product manager in a tough organizational context, is how to say no. And I think one of the challenges with this is we all know that to be a good product manager, you have to keep your team focused on the most impactful things that you can be working on right now, which means you have to say no to everything else. So I know like some people even have to do this every day.

**Petra Wille** (0:48)
Multiple times, maybe.

**Teresa Torres** (0:50)
Yeah, multiple times a day. So let me just stop there and let you react. What are your thoughts on how product managers can get better at saying no?

**Petra Wille** (1:02)
Yeah, I think the first step, and not every junior product manager gets told this, is to acknowledge that it's part of the job.
It's part of the job to help your team to focus on the things that they need to focus on. And it's always the case that there is more work to do than your team could basically work on. So that's in all companies, all the time, that's the thing. So people get creative, which is amazing. They have new ideas, which is amazing. And we need all sorts of ways to prioritize stuff and to filter stuff and to kill ideas and to say no to ideas, right? This is a lot of the core job of a product person, I'd say, as you were mentioning in the intro, right? So that's the nature of the role. And I think that's the first thing that I would always recommend people, just acknowledge that fact. That's why the role is not for everybody, because it's, you cannot just, you're not Santa Claus. You cannot, if people have ideas and come to your desk, you can't just like, not buy the thing and hand it to them. It's not how it works.

**Teresa Torres** (2:16)
It'd be great if you were Santa Claus, and you could just make decisions about what to build based on how naughty or nice your colleagues were.

**Petra Wille** (2:23)
Oh, that would actually, that is how we did it in the past, right? The hippo prioritization model, to some extent, that's that.

**Teresa Torres** (2:31)
Actually, before you go on, I want to highlight something you said that I want to make sure people don't miss, and that no matter what your role is in an organization, there is always more work than can possibly be done. I think it took me a long time to learn this because I was the kind of person that I was like, I'll just work more, right? And I got to a point where I literally was in a job, but where it was not humanly possible. Like I could no longer ignore that fact. And I think this is where teams get themselves into trouble. They want to, especially if people like me are kind of have a little bit of a people pleasing part of their personality, right? Like you are caretakers, people who naturally want to help. We want to be able to say yes to everything. And I think there's a hard truth of like full stop. You cannot say yes to everything. That is not possible. So, if it is part of the job, there will be things you have to say no to. Okay. So, I just wanted to double click on that a little bit.

**Petra Wille** (3:34)
That's amazing. Yeah. Because people like us always think like, if only we would be more efficient, if only we would have this one other engineer, if only we finally would get this, I don't know, quality assurance person on the team.

**Teresa Torres** (3:50)
Productivity book or all, use this new time management system, and suddenly I'll be able to do it all.

**Petra Wille** (3:57)
Yeah. So, and that is impossible. And to some extent, that's why both you and I love tree-like structures where we could actually create visibility of all the ideas and all the opportunities that we currently have. Because this is part of saying no, is that you show to people that you listen to them, that you have their ideas somewhere, that they don't just disappear, that's basically the worst thing that can happen. So a super excited stakeholder comes to you, has an idea, they think it's amazing, you immediately realize it's maybe not that amazing, and you just put it nowhere. And this is the worst thing that could happen. So one thing that I always advise product people to do is treat all ideas equal to some extent. So no matter where they're coming from, it can be your ideas, it can be the ideas of your team, can be stakeholder ideas, can be client and customer ideas. What you need is a system to structure them a bit. Because again, not all ideas come equal. Sometimes it's super small things that somebody brings to your table. Let's change this checkbox here, and we bet more people will be signing up. And then other things are really like innovative, big ideas that are more under strategic flight altitude, right? So the first thing that I would encourage the product people to have is a bit of a system that helps them to think about, okay, is this an idea that has an impact on the strategic level? So does it work? Does it help us to kind of work towards the strategy that we currently have? And that hopefully organization is having, I know not everybody is in that situation of having one. But if there is a company or even product strategy, that would be the first thing. So is it touching that layer? Is it helping us to execute towards this strategy? And if it's not covered by your current strategic intent, then you know it's something big. But if it's still promising enough that you consider to running a bigger strategic discovery on it, then it's definitely something that you need to discuss with leadership, for example. That's not something that you easily take on with your team, because it has a strategic impact, right? So you need a bit of a system to understand how big is the idea, how big is the impact of that idea if we take it on and look at it for a bit more in detail.