Prioritisation and First Principles
The intersection of effective prioritisation and the first principles approach can create great products faster. By great products, I mean products that don’t contain features that are unimportant but appeared super-important during the requirements phase.
These always reappear, don’t they?
Over the years I have learned the usefulness of first principles. The payoff is grand, the utility so good that you would never go back to brute-force methods of problem identification and problem-solving ever again.
The only downside? It’s a very tiring approach.
As a result, many product managers end up forgoing prioritisation techniques after they have come up with the first principles of their problem statements.
If you are one of them, I empathise with you. However, I cannot insist enough that this is when prioritisation is going to be your most crucial lever.
We have limited resources, and often we are shielded from this truth, especially if your organisation has a stronghold on its market. But as a product manager who understands the business end of a problem, you need to consider the truth of limited resources whenever you make and sell product decisions.
Limited resources lead to the constant push for ruthless prioritisation. Think of it as a negotiation process, only that here you are negotiating with yourself before taking your ideas out to your customers.
This self-negotiation can be cumbersome, tiring and wasteful if you don’t have a prioritisation mindset.
Prioritise -> Empathise -> Reprioritise ->Sell -> Move on
Once you prioritise ruthlessly and with a mindset that is mindful of the ultimate truth (that you have limited resources), you communicate your solutions and the order of business to your stakeholders with a lot of evidence and authenticity.
This helps you pitch your solutions as a story, and your prioritisation becomes an anchor that aligns and pulls everyone together towards the best possible way of solving the business problem.
Not to forget, that problem was already broken down by you into its first principles, but hey, by this time you would have already internalised this in your narrative! ;)
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