Negotiate like a pro: how to say ‘No’ to product feature requests…

… and still stay on good terms with your stakeholders

Imagine you’re a product manager and a co-worker from Marketing comes to you with a feature request. Let’s call her ‘fictitious Annie’. She asks you, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we built this amazing crypto-blockchain feature into our product?” Well…

Your inner voice goes, “Noooooooo…😩 we don’t have time for this!” Your roadmap is already packed with lots of promising ideas and experiments. You’ve fallen behind on your ambitious OKRs and you’re close to the end of the quarter.

It might be a cool feature, but now is just not the right time to focus on it. You have to say ‘No’ to fictitious Annie. What’s the best way to go about it? 

This post was originally published on Medium in June 2018. Click here to keep reading.