Hi All, Please take a moment and share your availability on this Doodle for a call. Our topic will be the evolving roles in Product Management and making the leap to Product Leadership. There will also be time if anyone has a burning topic to discuss. I'll look to get this scheduled based on responses by this Friday.

Four of us sat down to talk about Prioritization Hell. A few things that stuck with me: - Clear is kind. Brené Brown said it and every one of us had a story that proved it. The support team that replaced "we've logged your feedback" with "honestly, there's a 0.5% chance this happens" — and customers thanked them for it. The product leader who killed a low-traffic website simply by saying it wasn't in Q2, Q3, or Q4. They shut it down. Right outcome, finally. - Frameworks are a communication tool, not a decision engine. Did the iPhone come out of a spreadsheet? Use RICE when you have a specific problem. Use it to break a tie. Use it to teach a junior PM how to think. Don't use it to pretend a decision you've already made is data driven. - The hardest no isn't the off-strategy stuff. That gets easier with experience. The hard no is the thing that's genuinely good, has real support, and you still have to kill it because you only have so much bandwidth and you have to protect the best stuff. - AI is making prioritization harder, not easier. Everyone sees what's possible now. The CFO wants to know why you can't ship faster. The backlog got longer. The requests got louder. "I've created a monster" was said out loud by at least one person in the room. This is what The Product Room is for. Not slides. Not frameworks. Just honest conversation with people who've been in the same rooms. Next session coming next month. Watch this space. @Rob Taylor @Therese Alburg @Jay Fluegel what landed for you last night? Did I miss anything? Drop it below.

Hey Product Room — we're talking prioritization on our call tomorrow and I wanted to drop this here before we jump on. Lately it feels to me like the hardest prioritization problem isn't the roadmap. It's the thing that's genuinely good, has real support, and you still have to kill it because you and your team only have so much bandwidth and you need to protect the best stuff. Come ready to talk about what you're holding onto right now that might need to go. See you soon!

Something I keep seeing with PMs right now...both the ones on my team and the ones I coach is that the inner critic is LOUD! And I'm starting to think it is sometimes responsible for why we are so bad at saying no. We all know how to say no. We've read the frameworks, we've done the prioritization exercises, we know what a good roadmap looks like. But the critic is running in the background telling you that saying no means you're not a team player, not strategic enough, not on top of it enough. So you say yes. And then yes again. And suddenly your roadmap looks like everyone else's priority list and nothing on it is actually yours. Let's discuss the role of that inner voice on our call next week when we talk about Prioritization. Because the pressure on priorities is both external and internal.