Really enjoyed the post. I was surprised when I was given the task of doing product management (along with my dev job) that the resources were extremely poor. Everything just says &quot;talk to customers, listen to customers, etc. etc&quot;.<p>Though Chad also mentions those things, it isn&#x27;t the top priority.<p>I came up with a solution that worked for our team which was seriously struggling with focusing on priorities (which is why they asked me to take product management from the CEO).<p>I came up with 5 questions that we&#x27;d answer in our planning meetings, which were supposed to happen every other week, but realistically was about once a month.<p>1) are we living up to our promises<p>2) are we able to demo the app effectively and get customers to imagine themselves using it and understanding what it can do for them<p>3) is anything holding back sales<p>4) what are our upcoming company milestones, and what does development need to do to accomplish these<p>5) is there anything else we&#x27;d personally like to see or play with.<p>The first question was measuring us against our mission statement. This will be different for every company, but I found it to be an amazing question because we had a security focus as part of our key values and yet we had a fairly large security hole in our product. This being the first question meant that our promise to our customers was our priority.<p>The second question about demoing was pretty self explanatory. It wasn&#x27;t just &#x27;demo&#x27; could people come to our website and understand what we do and why they need it. It was the pre-sales and if a feature was missing that would help people see what we could do for them, that is where this got picked up.<p>Then came the actual sale. This included the ability for a customer to complete a sale, but also feature requests that customers may have brought up where the missing feature was preventing us from gaining a customer. Note: this is different from a feature which is preventing a customer from understanding how our product would help them.<p>Some may find it strange that we prioritized demo over sale, but we were focusing on customer acquisition growth, not sales growth at the time.<p>The business goals was a bit non-obvious. For instance we had an important meeting where we needed to show a certain capability to an investor. This wasn&#x27;t a customer, and was de-prioritized over sales, but these sorts of things need to be captured. This question also catches things like upcoming conferences where we may need a special marketing page, etc. etc.<p>Anything else. This is &#x27;play time&#x27;, and to be honest we rarely had any time to put things in this bucket. We normally looked at the list of things to do and went &quot;we&#x27;ve got weeks of work that take priority over anything else we want to do, so customer take priority&quot;.<p>Once we had our tasks from each of the questions, we would do a quick prioritization plan on them, but with the general understanding that the order of the questions had already done the majority of priority planning for us.<p>I think we had some success with this model, but keen to hear what others have tried as I&#x27;ve just stepped into a new role as PM&#x2F;Dev.