A little thread on prioritization...

When chatting with product leadership, I’ll often hear someone say something like “well, the biggest opportunity for us is figuring out a way to __X__”. Cool.

Then we chat about their roadmap, and nothing is focused on X.

Mystery... (1/5)

...so we chat more. Often, X is referred to as a “hard problem with lots of different opinions on how to fix it”.

We go deeper...”Well we tried [something] and it didn’t work”.

Deeper...”I’m not sure we have the right people for X”.

OK. Now we are getting somewhere (2/5)

I remember talking to a head of product who admitted they would pay $30 million to fix a problem through partnership, but was only investing $1 million a year to seize the problem internally.

There was that little faith. Why? (3/5)

This wicked cycle of fear of failure, under-investment, failure, too much work in progress (everything takes a while), no visible impact, shiny objects, etc. 

Product teams literally talk themselves out of having a shot at impact and only work on safe bets... (4/5)

...meanwhile the opportunities the underpin the whole product never get touched. Say you takes 10 tries to chip away at something *really really important*. But the upside is huge. You have to focus some amount of energy there (5/5)