Focus

Every organization has projects that they just don't seem to be able to make progress on because no one team or department is responsible. When they become critically urgent, a 'rock team' is a way to make significant progress inside a quarter.

With a large organization, you can't walk each PM through a quarter's prioritization tradeoffs. Use capacity planning to do this with many PMs at once.

If I am working closely with an experienced team, this is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get a sense for how long it might take to build something new.

I don't reach to OKRs often, because most companies lack the maturity to use them. But, there is one kind of company where they make sense.

For companies that deliver 10-30 features per quarter across a handful of development teams, PMs will have different intuitions about what matters. Using a structured approach to align their intuitive perceptions might help.

The classic problem with MoSCoW prioritization is that you end up with too many Must Have items, and the PM gets stuck, unable to prioritize them.

Use a User Story Map as a negotiation tool with the team to figure out what your product increments will be.

The roadmap is full of dates with unknown origins. Engineering is complaining about shifting priorities. PMs are surprised by and complaining about dependencies. PMs are barely keeping up with sprint planning and not providing their teams with a mid- or long-term view.

The ideal context for this play is a financially savvy company struggling with product prioritization conversations that are emotional, anecdote-driven, and intuitive.