Prioritisation: how work as PM affect my life
Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you.
- John C. Maxwell
What is PM
It was early 2020, when I started my job as a product manager (PM) in one of leading online grocery service in Southeast Asia, after resigning as a corporate worker. A product manager is a person who is responsible for managing the digital product. Meanwhile, product management itself is an intersection between business, technology, and user experience function.
One of the core competencies that is required to do a PM job — that also reflects in day to day PM task — is prioritisation. Prioritisation itself is the process of deciding the relative importance between things. In the real situation, PM will face a situation where many important requests are coming, bugs found, the development process found its obstacles, etc. Meanwhile, we have limited resources, such as limited time to develop and deliver things, engineer to develop features, and cost of the project, that’s why we need to do prioritisation.
The life that full of choice
Aside from day to day job as a PM, I also have another part of life that I need to live. We all have a life outside our daily job. It might be our relationship with other people, our hobbies, even entertainment and vacation. One thing that I realise lately is that life is full of choice. Why do we have to choose among the provided alternatives? Because we all have limited resources: we have limited energy, we have limited time — only 1440 minutes per day, we have limited money, we have limited focus. You couldn’t be able to be close to everyone; you couldn’t master all of the musical instruments; you couldn’t buy all things you want. You have to choose between possible alternatives.
The way of how we live next probably be affected by the alternatives we chose previously, and there might be no undo or reset button if we think if we made a fault in selecting alternatives. One of the mitigations from wrongly choose between alternatives is to have a strong consideration and knowing all the details of the alternatives.
For example, in choosing a cellular phone I had to buy, I had several considerations that might be important. My considerations were: how big is the battery capacity, how good is the camera, and how good is the shape. Also, from what I’ve been researched, I had several alternatives: Apple iPhone 11, Samsung Galaxy S20, and Google Pixel 4a. Based on those, I also had to know how good is the performance of my alternatives based on my personal considerations. The performances of every alternative might be different; Samsung is best at battery capacity; meanwhile, iPhone is a stylish phone. But Google has the best camera over all of my alternatives.
You might be confused and sometimes becoming indecisive; you need to go through the alternatives one by one again, or even need to do more intensive research such as asking the expert, asking the ones who experienced the same thing or just trying to trust your gut.
How PM help me to decide things in life
As PM, we usually use structured prioritisation tools, for example, RICE method. RICE method evaluates alternatives based on four critical aspects in product development: reach (how many users will get impacted), impact (how impactful the feature will solve the problem), confidence (how certain is needed information, such as data, skills, etc. to implement the feature), and effort (how hard to develop the feature). All the alternatives have to be rated based on those aspects, calculate them, and finally pick the alternative based on the final score.
The RICE method uses a common calculation: a benefit-cost ratio, comparing what we will get (benefit) and what we have to spend (cost). This comparison, I think, is the simplest way to assess how good the thing is — we all want to get as big as possible and spend as low as possible, right?
Because in my work life is familiarised with the same framework — the RICE method, the benefit-cost ratio — I sometimes use this for helping me decide between alternatives. As an indecisive person, this helped me a lot.
For example, it happened not a long time ago, my friends and I decided to go to Bandung to attend a wedding. The case is when we had to choose a place to stay in. The alternatives varied a lot, from bed and breakfast, hotel, and villa. The choices between them also varied, from the cheapest to the most expensive, nearest to furthest from the city centre, facilities provided. Based on what mattered to us, we assessed all the aspects of all the alternatives. So I made a simple spreadsheet, the row contains all the alternatives, and the column contains the considerations or criteria.
For easier explanation, I compared the alternatives based on one criterion for what we are going to get: hotel location, and one criterion for what we are going to spend: price per night. For each criterion, I made a categorisation based on the price range and our preferable location. We inspected, assessed, and got the score each alternative. Based on the score, we sorted them from highest to lowest, and we could conclude that the best alternatives were The 101 Hotel, House Hotel, and Namin because they had the most prominent and same score. Then, we could choose between those three based on our preferences.
If there’s more than one criterion of what you get or spend, we could multiply them, but make sure we place the them correctly if that is something you get or spend. For example, we have another criterion to consider: facilities provided and booking complexity. We could place facilities provided as numerator because it is something we could get, and booking complexity as denominator because it is something we have to spend.
I frequently use this method in deciding some things, like deciding which books to buy, hotel to stay in, place to visit, even gadget to buy. When it comes to various alternatives and consideration criteria, I found this method is beneficial.
Self-reflection
Sometimes we have a clear cut between work and life; we don’t want to involve work things in life, reciprocally, we also don’t want to involve life things in life. But as I grew up, I realised and learned that there are good things that we could bring in work to life, vice versa, as long as it could give a positive impact to us. Something like method, knowledge, or habit that we think could lead to something beneficial if we implemented in our other aspect of life.
