The All-You-Can-Eat Buffet. Possibly America's greatest invention, closely followed by two equally important ideas: the Weed Whacker and the Internet. Where else can you indulge every savory and sweet taste bud you have over the course of 6,000 calories for the low low price of $9.99?
We have all been there, whether we like to admit it or not. We walk in thinking we'll get a little of this, a little of that, some veggies from the big salad bar they have, maybe a slice of pizza if we're feeling particularly indulgent. Only to realize upon sitting down at our table that our plate is a cornucopia of: pasta covered in Alfredo sauce, garlic mashed potatoes with gravy, a slice of yellow cake and a slice of cheesecake. We had the best of intentions and instead went for carbs covered in either some form of cream sauce or sugar.
And damn was it good.
The greens are cooked in bacon fat, don’t worry they aren’t healthy!
Now please contrast that with everyone’s second favorite culinary experience, school lunch. A faded plastic tray with 6 compartments, each filled with a relatively unidentifiable source of calories, usually served with a spoon and a small space for silverware at the bottom (Sporks, another one of America's finest contributions to the world, patented in 1874).
Despite useful trivia and such a glowing review of those delicacies we enjoyed between art class and recess, I would like to propose that School lunches are better than All-you-can-eat buffets. Let me explain.
Humans aren't the best at self control. We have great intentions, all of which are swept under the table, along with the crumbs of our third piece of cornbread and disregarded as soon as we see that swirling display of cake slices with their caramel coatings glistening in a halogen colored spotlight. And when it comes down to it, we often simply pick the easiest choice or whatever satisfies our craving the most.
As a product manager, we want more than anything to get new features in the hands of our users. That’s our craving, our cheesecake. So who in their right mind, when given an empty plate, is going to fill it up with a salad that will take 10 minutes to make, another 3 minutes to appropriately toss with dressing and then 20 minutes to chew through, when instead you can fill that plate up in 30 seconds with carbs that are half-processed for you already?!
And here is where school lunch takes the cake. hehe
With school lunches, you don't have an empty plate. You have a tray with meticulously, precisely and scientifically portioned compartments, each with their own purpose. One for the main entree, one for veggies, one for fruit, one for dessert, one for milk and one for silverware. It would look pretty out of place if you filled all of those up with cake, so instead, you follow the guidelines and fill it up appropriately, maybe sneaking in an extra fruit cup here and there.
Decisions, decisions…
Lunch trays provide a framework for us and offer protection from our own human tendencies. They take some of the freedom out of decision-making that can get us in trouble (like only eating cake) but they still allow some degree of independence (do you want carrots or broccoli for your vegetable today?). And no humans are exempt from these temptations. The easy things, the most rewarding things, the things with the lowest barrier to entry, all are tempting and often, these are all too easy to pick over the hard things, the truly valuable things.
Product managers own prioritizing which features to build and ship from a veritable buffet of options, especially in enterprise where the feature requests are numerous and nuanced. It just too easy to pick the quick wins, the features we’re most familiar with, or the ones for the customer screaming the loudest, something I’ve done more times than I probably like to admit. But we can’t, and shouldn’t, be trusted to pick an appropriate balance from that buffet without any guidance (we’re humans too!) and we need a lunch tray to help us make the right choices.
Everyone’s lunch tray will look a little different. Prioritization frameworks come in many shapes and sizes, from quantitative ones like Opportunity Scoring to qualitative ones like Pruning the Product tree (a favorite of mine) and it will depend on both your product and your organization, probably with some experimentation, to determine the one(s) that are the best fit for you. But whatever you do, don't go in with an empty plate!
So when you are picking features out of your backlog for your next release, you can ask yourself, am I using a lunch tray to make the right choices? Or do I have an Old Country Buffet plate full of Mac 'n cheese, Freedom fries and ice cream?