Mastering the art of saying NO!
You face a simple choice between a yes and no many times a day. You may not think about how impactful such decisions are because they seem…
You face a simple choice between a yes and no many times a day. You may not think about how impactful such decisions are because they seem trivial. But that may be the difference between reaching something outstanding or mediocre.
You acquire a new responsibility for every yes you say while saying no is a decision.
Reflect on it for a while. Which is your yes/no ratio? How often do you say no to requests? How easy is it for you to say no to somebody?
Saying no can be intimidating because it can create a conflict, it will potentially put the person on defensive mode, and a more intense conversation could start, and you may not want to handle it. But now, what happens if you avoid such conflicts? You’d lose your ability to focus; you become continuously distracted by too many things to do and an endless and overwhelming to-do list.
If you want to remain overwhelmed and distracted, saying yes often is the way to go. However, if you want to benefit from the power of focus and put your energy and power at one thing at a time, there’s a way out, and I’d like to show it to you.
It’s not what you say but how you say it
Product teams receive gazillions of requests each day. Business people want something, customer service bugs you with customers’ complaints, tech debt is piling up, and the list continues; I just named a few. If you say yes to everything coming in your direction, the pressure will be too heavy for you to handle, and eventually, the team will collapse.
I learned my lesson the hard way. As I started my product management adventure, I tried to please everyone. I said way too often yes and seldomly no. As a result, the team became overwhelmed and distracted; we had to cut corners to deliver everything I promised the stakeholders. Needless to say, stakeholders were disappointed with our deliverables, and we were embarrassed with our work quality. I knew I had to change something. I decided to implement a new strategy.
My strategy was simple, for every request I’d receive, I would say no to it three times without thinking. If the request were so important, the stakeholder would not give up that easily. This strategy reduced the distractions significantly, and we could focus on fewer items and create more valuable results. However, my boss didn’t stop receiving e-mails from angry stakeholders saying that I was pushing them back too much. Once again, I had to change something.
Product professionals need to focus on what matters most while keeping a sustainable relationship with stakeholders.
Help stakeholders say NO to themselves
Why is it so important to say no to most requests? I asked myself that many times, and I came to the following conclusion. Focus is what empowers the team to create delightful solutions. When we have clarity on what we want to achieve, we can go full steam into it and deliver outstanding results. And that’s when I found the missing piece of the puzzle.
It’s not about saying no randomly. It’s about saying no to whatever distracts you from your current goal.
I learned from great product teams that they pursue one goal at a time, and only once they reach that goal do they move to the next one. It’s about to start finishing and stop starting.
The challenge of saying no is keeping the relationship sustainable with your stakeholders. Yet, you can solve that when you learn how to say no without saying no. The best alternative is when you get your stakeholders to say no to themselves, and that’s magical.
Here’s my strategy:
Set a Product Goal that contributes to your Product Vision
Share the Product Goal with all stakeholders
Inform stakeholders that your team is focused on reaching the Product Goal
Whenever stakeholders bring requests unrelated to the Product Goal, help them say no to themselves by asking questions
As you imagine, the fourth step is the trickiest. Let me share with you the questions I use:
How would your request help the team reach the Product Goal?
Would you be willing to tell the sponsor of our current Product Goal we’d need to stop this initiative to focus on your request?
Could you help me understand what the expected outcome of your request is?
What would happen if we didn’t tackle it?
How would you measure its success?
Which evidence would you have supporting this is relevant for our end-users?
When I ask these questions, stakeholders become reflective and open to exchange. Generally, they conclude the request is either unprepared or irrelevant for the moment. They also tend to support reaching a relevant goal for the company and are unwilling to go against a sponsor when their request isn’t sound enough.
Learn how to say no to yourself as well
Sometimes we focus on protecting teams from external interruptions, but we may be surprised that many distractions come from team members. I learned to be more mindful of my activities. I continuously reflect if my actions contribute to a goal; if they don’t, it’s time to say no to myself and reorient to what leads to the goal.
Product teams should have a shared goal to pursue. Everyone aims to reach the same, and each team member should support each other. Sometimes, we need to call the others out because they may derail and start working on something unrelated to the goal.
Encourage team members to say no to themselves. It’s our responsibility to focus on the goal and remove distractions either from outside or inside.
Saying No is powerful
One of the principles of our Agile Product Manifesto states:
Saying NO unlocks focus to deliver valuable solutions
When we wrote our manifesto, we exchanged in-depth about the importance of focusing on one step at a time. We know teams cannot create state-of-the-art solutions when they suffer from constant context switching. Therefore, we encourage teams to figure out how they can say no to whatever distracts them from achieving their goals.
We’d be glad to know how you help your teams focus. We know it’s daunting to focus on a step at a time when everyone wants you to parallelize everything at the same time. Yet, we also know which dreadful results parallel activities bring to product development.
Please share your learnings with us, and help us rock the product world.
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