How Can You Streamline the Unstoppable Thunderstorm of Requests?
3 approaches to structure how you transform idea to value.
Do you know what all PMs have in common?
More work than time.
No matter your industry, company size, or product stage, people from all layers of the organization will load you with requests. Beyond that, customers also have their wishes, and we’d better not start talking about B2B.
You’ll become a Jira janitor if you don’t streamline how you receive requests.
It’s pretty damn hard to separate signs from noise. Yet, you’ve got to do that if you want to thrive as a product manager.
I continuously explore products that simplify our lives, and recently, I stumbled upon something that deserves your attention.
If you believe everyone should shout unstructured ideas in your face, your job is to organize that. Stop reading this. Yet, if you want to simplify the mess, we’re game.
Shall we?
Don’t Let the Thunderstorm Flood You
Being a PM means dealing with an unbearable number of requests.
Salespeople will promise things without understanding feasibility
CEO’s random ideas will become the next priority
Marketing will learn about competitors and panic
Customer service will hear about loads of feature requests
AI Agents will recommend you loads of cool things to do
You cannot escape the thunderstorm, but you can deal with it.
Yet, you must understand what not to do.
My biggest mistake was trying to please everyone. I transformed ideas into backlog items without challenging their value. Every second week, I planned what to do based on capacity, not impact. Shame on me.
I did painfully learn my lesson. Have you learned yours already?
One key aspect of avoiding trying to please everyone is simplifying decision-making. If you don’t do that, be ready to prioritize based on opinions.
Here are my three favorite approaches to streamlining your move from idea to value.
1. Make it Easy for You to Say No
Honest question for you: Do you know what matters most right now?
Seriously. Can you answer that?
If your answer means a list of 15 items, that’s not prioritization. It’s the lack of it.
Prioritization means knowing what you should be doing right now, and the first step is to simplify your life.
A brief story for you.
Once, I was a product manager excited to drive value, until one beautiful day, a prescriptive roadmap crashed into my soul.
Our C-Suite promised 27 features to our investors. Worse, they didn’t talk to any product manager.
Yet, we had a big elephant in the room. Our customer lifetime value was five times lower than the acquisition cost, and retention was at an all-time low.
I went to the CEO and presented the reports, comparing them to the features on the roadmap. Only five contributed to driving retention up. So I asked, should we focus on what’s killing us or blindly follow a roadmap without knowing why?
The CEO was reflective but gave the green light to improve retention. All I needed to do was continue. After a few months, we could show improvement, create momentum, and finally challenge requests against retention, which was the only thing that mattered.
I was torn. Initially I thought about swallowing the roadmap and playing the mad game, but I was tired, and I dared to talk to the CEO. I just wish I had that courage before. It was revealing.
Lesson: Know what you’re optimizing and say no to anything distracting you.
2. Standardize Ideas Intake
The easier it is for people to shout ideas, the more time PMs need to invest in understanding why they matter.
If you let people bring ideas just with headlines, good luck. You will have to invest considerable time before deciding if that’s worth your time.
I’m just tired of wasting time. I want people to reflect on and structure their ideas, and then we can talk.
After several years playing this game, I started using a framework I call BASICS+, which has the following items:
Business: Define what’s in it for the business
Audience: Describe who will benefit from it
Situation: Clarify the context
Impact: How does the idea improve your audience’s life
Current Solution: How does our audience deal with that currently
Satisfaction: Their satisfaction level with current alternatives
+Frequency: How often would they benefit from it
Does it take time to answer all that? Yes, it does. And that’s the reason it matters. Irrelevant ideas won’t cut. You need to be ruthless when it comes to prioritization.
Remember our friend GIGO: garbage in, garbage out.
3. Aim to Focus, Not to Be Popular
The best product folks I know have unpopular opinions. They don’t aim to please everyone; they do all they can to maximize value.
You will benefit from streamlining your idea intake and ruthlessly prioritizing. Here’s what I recommend doing
Goal: Define the goal that matters most now
Transparency: Share the goal with everyone and its reasoning
Idea Intake: Standardize how ideas come to your idea
Ruthless prioritization: Drop distracting ideas and focus on promising ones
Gradual investment: Listen to signs and run experiments to improve your definition-making.
Share results: Ensure everyone knows the learnings and progress.
Rinse & repeat: Iterate, adapt, and improve.
I will tell another story about why popularity won’t push you far.
2015 I got promoted because I mastered the art of increasing velocity.
The team was flying high, and I wrote stories sharper than anyone. Developers could implement them without talking to anyone, and productivity reached an all-time high.
After 3 years in the same company, I needed new air. Then the shock came. I failed every single interview I took. How did that happen?
I wasn’t a product manager. I was just a glorified backlog manager.
It hit me like a thunderbolt. But as Ray Dalio says, “Pain + Reflection = Progress.”
I reinvented myself and unlocked my growth. But I did have to unlearn most of my old excellent skills.
It’s about value, not features.
Are you a glorified backlog manager or a value maximizer?
Let’s wrap up this post with one of my favorite quotes.
Final Thoughts & Key Takeaways
No matter how well you plan and forecast, there's always going to be unplanned work.
Bugs, outages, and incoming requests that disrupt your carefully crafted roadmap. Linear put together this breakdown of how they manage unplanned work.
Product teams have more to do than capacity, and that’s precisely why you need to learn how to filter out distractions
If you don’t simplify prioritization, nobody will
The more unstructured ideas you receive, the more time you waste on irrelevant matters. Standardize your idea intake to streamline value creation.
Not everyone will like you when you say no to their half-baked ideas, yet it’s your role to maximize value, not to increase time wasted
Shall We Reshape the Product World Together?
Join me to break free from outdated product management!
Let’s foster the 100x PM movement! No more feature factory.
Untrapping Product Teams Book: Practical insights to give hope to teams.
Anti-BS Product Management: Escape the noise. Deliver value.
How to Craft a Product Strategy that Works: Craft something that lasts.
Product Discovery Done Right: Break free from the feature factory.
This is indeed one of the hardest parts of product management. Yet one of the most important ones.
“2015 I got promoted because I mastered the art of increasing velocity”… you yourself answered why someone would pursue something like above which may not have a significant impact on the business. Most people don’t want to get fired or want to grow in their career and unfortunately are incentivized to take suboptimal decisions.