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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

How do you decide which features to prioritize and which to pass on? You'll probably get a wide range of responses to that question, but you'll also probably get a good feeling for who is a competent PM and who is probably not. Hint: good PMs won't just base it on gut feelings or anecdotal evidence.

How do you balance priorities that you're hearing from customers with priorities that you're hearing from sales? PMs often find themselves in between sales, customers and engineering, and balancing those conflicting priorities is tough.

How do you convince engineers to take on hard tasks? A lot of times PMs come up with great ideas but engineers will balk at actually implementing them because "it's too hard."

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PM is all about impact and effort. Priority goes to the high impact low effort stuff first, and low impact high effort generally goes the way of the bin. Strategic alignment is also import whenever priority is evaluated.

> Hint: good PMs won't just base it on gut feelings or anecdotal evidence.

Sure, good PMs tend to collect great evidence from customer interviews, usage data etc. However, getting too hung up on data is sometimes a trap. I've seen some great ideas from teams - some even fully implemented - shot down by other PMs because there was no research.

What if you don't have the data, but the idea is something you know will generate massive value? This is the exact issue startup ideas face... no one knows if an idea is valuable until it's tested and a product hits the market. But early stage founders and great product managers might just know something is the right idea yet have zero data to back it.

Any product a product manager has ever worked on was initially created from nothing. Data wasn't generated until people took a risk and delivered.

Yep, the "it" factor matters. If data drove everything we wouldn't need people to make decisions.

"It" factor? What does "it" mean here (silly question i guess)

Edit: the “it factor” is that feeling in your heart that you get when you know you are with the right person ... No, with the right software feature.

One method I can think of off hand is to de-risk new ideas by triangulating from success already in the market. Use the data that other's have collected to launch their successful thing and show how your feature or product is a combination of things already working. I think PMs who can do that have the "it" factor. It's walking the line between going with gut and not having time/resources/energy to get actual data.

> Hint: good PMs won't just base it on gut feelings or anecdotal evidence.

Sure you want some structure, but people often get this wrong.

Intuition is surprisingly important and it's easy to get into some pseudo-scientific approach and call it data-driven (eg. biased questions/scales in surveys are very common).

Ultimately to be approximately right is still better than to be precisely wrong.

The problem with intuition is that it’s often misleading or outright wrong. The only time I’ll trust a PMs intuition is when their background closely matches the target audience.

Oh wow, that was sneaky.

In my experience, all sides do come up with "great ideas" all the time, but it is their job to estimate effort and ROI before starting on any one idea.

Sure, there are plenty of engineers who are unable to come up with an incremental approach for a "great idea", but there are as many PMs who are unable to understand the incremental approach and would rather have it all or nothing.

Every one of them needs to experience true incremental delivery of value to really buy into it.

Sometimes, especially in B2B Saas, it's as simple as looking at potential short-term and long-term revenue (building something that is more sellable).

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