Never Let Dreamers Ruin Your Project

Follow the goal, rather than the unproved idea

Yesterday I had a meeting with a mentee who is now a project manager. I just checked her form and she now suffered from protecting her team from unrelated requirements that might damage their project goals.

She said: “I always have to receive many requests from sales or senior management, but most of them are not related to current goals but only ideas that are unvalidated or data-supportive.”

Are you familiar with the situation? Maybe it’s happening to you, right? As a project manager, sometimes you, as a sandwich, have to balance the pressure from multiple business units to make sure the goals are met. You even have no authority to say “NO” when you are facing hierarchical issues.

However, aren’t there any approaches to resolving the issue? Yes, there are.

In my opinion, I would suggest you handle the situations with 3 steps.

• Define project roadmap in the beginning

The step is very important since it tells you what kinds of features should be delivered along the development journey. Any changes should consider if they would endanger the ultimate goals. As a project manager, you need to have a picture in mind, and select requests that help the team achieve the goals, no matter adding values to them or accelerating the journey.

In this case, the sales/senior management might don’t know the roadmap and randomly propose their unchecked ideas. And you need to check if they could be added in the roadmap. Saying “NO” is your responsibility to protect the team.

• Ask for further information to check if necessary

We embrace changes, but we also need to control them lest they should damage the team’s collaboration. Most time the proposed ideas are not validated up front, such as user research or market investigation, and you need to address this issue to remind them of providing you proven data to support their viewpoints.

Try to ask more questions. Why the request is needed? If they have any data support? If they are aligned with the current goals? How many customers think they are needed? Never let a piece of requirements from customers/imagination influence your direction.

• Set importance/urgency categories

If the ideas are validated and indeed many customers require them, put them into product backlogs, and arrange the items based on the importance and urgency.

If you put the above practices into actions, it would help you eliminate unnecessary interference that endangers your team. If you still have other problems, I sincerely invite you to have an online web call with me. It’s free, no sale, and I would answer your questions as possible as I could.

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