Dear Product Manager: Just Say No

Why you should delete requests that are past what you consider “soon & forecastable”.

(Created with http://www.stripcreator.com by the author)

With 100s of requests for a product, what do you do with the ones that simply are not on your current horizon? Do you put them into the “in two quarters” column? Do you put them on the “idea pile”? Do you keep pushing them back quarter by quarter?

I suggest a different method, which is the honest & transparent one in my opinion, but not the ones people tend to like at first.

Delete them.

More precisely, delete everything that is beyond your product event horizon.

I think:

• Every product manager has a “product event horizon” for his product.
• It’s the point where things are more uncertain than certain.
• Deleting these things past it is more honest than keeping them on and has a lot of benefits for both sides.

I recently thought about a simple request I got. “When team X is done migrating this tool TZ, please also update your tool YZ”. That seemed reasonable.

But when I got to realize that this “migration” isn’t done for another YEAR I decided to delete the request.

My reasoning was simple, if this migration is done in a year, both my and the migrated…