This article is an adapted translation of “ Desirability vs Defensibility: Deciding where to place your bets in the Grand Poker Game of Product Management ”, written by Jason Knight. Since it is a high-value content, we thought it would be a good idea to translate it to help the Brazilian Product community evolve. Enjoy your reading!
Recently, I’ve and how to decide where to make big bets . A lot of product management is about deciding how to make the biggest impact . When it comes to impact, people often get sucked into point-voting or numerical prioritization frameworks to try to stack random ranking features. That’s one way to do it, I guess (please don’t do that!), but we product managers need to think bigger than that .
In Product, there’s always a lot to do . That’s part of the game, and it’s the job of all product managers and product leads to make sure we prioritize impact and put our chips on the iceland mobile phone number right side of the table. In early-stage companies, anything other than that is the end . In later-stage companies, it leads to mediocrity . We always have too many great ideas and never enough developers to make them happen, so how do we decide what to work on?
When we think about making good decisions, we need to decide what to work on , but also how to work on it . One way to consider this is through the lens of expediency versus defensibility .
Defensibility vs. Desirability
If something is defensible, it means you have your own intellectual property . You have an advantage. Maybe even a patent! Examples of defensibility could be some content you produce yourself, or some kind of machine learning algorithm, user-generated content, or network effects that are hard to replicate.
We all know what desirable means in principle. But what we’re talking about here is not just what people want, it’s that they want to do it the way you want them to do it . For example, there’s no point delivering a world-class connected digital solution if your users don’t have good internet. You have to find out where they are, not where you want them to be (bonus if you can show them a path from A to B).
So, let's consider all of our resources in one quadrant , because everyone loves quadrants!
Not defensible and not desirable
If an initiative isn’t particularly desirable and isn’t very defensible, you should ask yourself why you’re working on it . Ideally, you want to get as much of that work out of the way as possible, with the caveat that you may have to do little things here and there. After all, we all work for companies and we all (hopefully) have customers. Sometimes we need to hold our noses and do what we have to do. But any company that spends all its time in this part of the quadrant is in a death spiral.
Not defensible, but desirable
Consider integrating with a partner . Life is too short to build another feature that already works! You’re unlikely to be able to compete with experts who only do this. We want to focus on what makes us special, not build a less capable version of something other people do for a living. Some might consider this a waste of money (surely anyone could build this themselves and save money!), but nothing comes for free, and you have to consider the opportunity cost.
Defensible, but not desirable
We’re in tricky territory here. Why? Because these initiatives seem like bad bets … but they may not be. You should seriously consider discarding initiatives in this part of the quadrant, but only after you’ve done enough research to ensure you’re not missing a diamond in the rough . Maybe there’s another market out there that this would work for. Maybe with a few tweaks, you could make it more desirable. Do your best with initiatives in this part of the quadrant, but be careful not to fall so in love with the technology that you forget about the users (hello Web 3!).
Defensible and desirable
Go all out! This is your best chance to create differentiated value and win in the marketplace. But you have to be careful . “Defensible” isn’t forever . You need to keep an eye on your competitors and make sure they aren’t developing their own defensible proposition or catching up to you. First mover advantage can be helpful, but you run the risk of getting in so early that you make mistakes—in which case you’ll find (in really desirable segments, at least) that others have tried to capitalize on those mistakes and overtake you. Don’t be a training ground for others, and stay alert !
This is not a quantitative picture
I’m not a fan of numerical prioritization frameworks ( RICE etc.), mainly because they give a sheen of quantitative respectability , but are ultimately based on biased and subjective inputs . We can’t just plug numbers into a formula and spit out a roadmap. If only product management were that simple!
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