How do you balance competing demands when managing a product?

Stakeholders tend to have BIG ideas for transformation their business, and struggle with identify how to prioritize how to get there because their vision is the end of the journey, not in-between. They need 11 features in their new digital workflow, and they are ALL SUPER IMPORTANT!!! because they never thought about what it would mean to have the first three. The business users who will be effected by this transformation have SMALL ideas. They have some very detailed, specific problems which make their lives miserable. Those problems will be fixed if we can do 13% of one of the features in the new digital workflow. Our focus as product managers has to be to make the connections between the two. Push the stakeholder down into the transitionary periods and understand what drives additional business value at each step along the way. Pull the users up to better understand how the whole puzzle will eventually fit together and think about how they want their entire role to be, not what it currently is.

Some clearly experienced perspectives here, thanks for the post. I've found that good Product companies rarely have a shortage of ideas, and the focus here has been mostly about internal demand competition. So the challenge is often not "am I working on something that customers will value" it's "we've identified too many things that we think customers value, how do we choose"? On top of the advice posted regarding company and product vision alignment, the things top Product companies do well is: have a prioritization method that includes how big a task/Product Dev is(resources) and what skills are required to complete it(critical FTE); a Roadmap process that is fluid, and includes regular check-ins to ensure market assumptions are still valid; and conviction around product decisions. That last one is critical - until we can predict the future, there is no way of knowing everything about your product, so your best course is to weigh the information you have, make a decision, and GO GO GO until you can get meaningful feedback from the market. Finally, it's equally important to have conviction around the things you choose NOT to work on.

What is paramount is that we leverage the collective team's expertise when making the difficult choices or tradeoffs. PM's are most effective when brokering interests from Sales, R&D, Marketing and Ops, just to name a few. All agree to the objective of a strong product but vary greatly in how to get there. It is rarely a bad idea to foster a culture of active listening among competing entities.

This challenge exists everywhere, as there are always more things to be done than what can be done. Having a clear product vision, roadmap and prioritization will always help but having an impact on predictive data on how a task will help the business move forward can be a game changer. Always start with "Why" before moving to "What" and "How". Also, learn to say "No" and don't keep pleasing everyone.

The job of a PM is to ultimately create value for the customer and business. In a healthy product company, there is a harmony between customer and business goals. However, in companies that don't put the customer first, stakeholders often have competing goals. Without introducing the user needs in the equation, it becomes very hard to prioritize, and what often happens is that stakeholder with the most influence will dominate and get their way. It is PMs responsibility to be able to justify their priorities by getting ahead of it - be prepared to share discovery work early and often. I recommend incorporating all user research, quotes, experiment results, design mockups and prototypes in both stakeholder reviews, and company wide demos. This approach helps build shared understanding among stakeholders, trust and buy in. In addition, it is also educational as it becomes more obvious what users needs are and how they are responding to latest ideas, prototypes and experiments (many in the company aren't that close to the customer).