Just Saying "No"

"No" can be the toughest word to say. Nobody likes to hear it. Executives generally hate to be told "no." But sometimes it's the most valuable word in a product manager's vocabulary, especially when it makes "yes!" possible. You can't build all your ideas, so someone has to say no to some of them. That means saying yes to the right ones.

Any good product development organization has more good ideas than it can possibly execute. Sometimes the ideas come from executives, sometimes from engineers, sometimes from customers and sometimes from product managers. It's the product manager's job to understand the company's business, the market situation, the customers, and potential customers well enough to make a case for what gets a yes or no (or a "later"). Each case will involve many factors - business goals, investment issues,  sales considerations, competitive conditions, technology opportunities and development resources - and they must be well understood and examined clearly. Strong cases will be made for competing initiatives, products or features.  How do you decide to say no?

First, know what business you're in (or what business you want to be in).  A decision to move to another market or product type may be appropriate, but sometimes it's outside a company's area of competence, or it's a distraction that can derail an existing business. For example, the landscape is littered with B-to-B companies that tried to move into a direct-to-consumer business, and vice versa. Product decisions have to make sense within an overall business strategy.

Second, know what you're capable of doing. A good idea is worthless if you don't have the resources to do it, or if it forces you to pull critical resources from another key product.

Third, know what you want to do that will make you successful. What makes your company or product special? What makes (or will make) you a market leader? Do that. What problems detract from your strengths? Fix them. Does a product or feature idea seem like a "nice" addition that doesn't reinforce your vision and distracts your staff? If it's not part of your strategy (you do have a strategy, right?) just say no!

This third point is crucial to running a focused company that develops a vision and brings it to market. It sometimes means saying no to good ideas that don't advance the vision. It sometimes means saying no to customers who are ready to pay for something that isn't part of your business strategy or product strategy.

Saying no to a customer who is ready to pay you is a classic dilemma. "If you add these new features, I'll buy one for everyone in my company!" says the customer. Sales is excited. Even though you had previously decided that the features weren't sufficiently important to include in the product, there's now an incentive - cash! - to add them and delay something else. But if your initial decision that most of your market doesn't need the features was correct, you could be letting down other, less vocal, customers, in order to please one who is waving cash in your face. And you may be giving a competitor a chance to pass you while you work on less-strategic features.

Companies that don't know their customers well have trouble saying no. Often they don't know which customers they need to please, from a strategic point of view. Or they just don't know what's really important to satisfying customers, and are unable to differentiate important customer requests from trivial ones.

I learned an important lesson from an innkeeper who is frequently asked to host guests who are in towns for weddings. She has figured out that these guests are often overly celebratory and make other guests uncomfortable. Even though she could book many wedding-related guests, she realized that it makes her inn less desirable to couples who are looking for a quiet getaway, and has a "no weddings" policy. Even though she is turning away thousands of dollars a year in business, she decided that by saying "no" to customers that don't support her business strategy, her business will be stronger and ultimately more successful.

Sometimes "no" is really "not yet." I once developed an online collaboration product that had a carefully staged roadmap, beginning with a rollout to small workgroups and building to an enterprise product over time. The sales force knew that the real volume lay in enterprise sales, and pressured executives to instruct us to release an enterprise product immediately. But we had designed a gradual rollout for good reasons, both technical and marketing. It was important to build a solid, scalable product, and have it succeed in small installations, before taking on large enterprises. We stuck to the roadmap, convinced Sales that it was in their interest to be patient, by saying "yes, but not yet."

A no can lead to new ways of saying yes. When I told an executive that we couldn't start a new project without derailing our current product, we brainstormed what it would take to start a new development effort by taking advantage of some underutilized resources and raising new investment to hire a new engineer and some contractors. I put together a plan and a presented it to our investors, who agreed to an additional investment to get the project started. It eventually led to a new line of business, but it never would have happened if we had not had the discipline to say no to an initial strategy that was doomed.

Knowing how and when to say no applies to defining a business, creating a product strategy, or choosing a feature set: By saying no sometimes, you can say yes! to the things that are really important. And that's really important.