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I've had a few deliveries that didn't end well. Everything was in place. A good team. Solid working conditions. A solution to a problem worth solving. But the timing was not right. People were not ready for it.

When is the right time then? Ask a fighter when is the right time to give a right hook to the opponent in the ring. Ask a couple on a date when is the right time to attempt that first kiss.

Ask a team when is the right time to launch a new solution. Too early and you risk confusion, resistance and poor adoption. Too late, and people have already developed workarounds, ingrained habits or lost trust in the process. Timing matters.

The ancient Greeks had two different words for time.

'Chronos' is the concept of linear time. The time we are used to. Measured in hours, days, weeks, months, and years. Or in sprints, roadmaps and deadlines.

'Kairos' refers to a more fluid, unpredictable, and qualitative time. Time measured in moments. The right action in the right moment can be the difference between success and failure.

We can't escape Chronos time. Dependencies and hard deadlines are unavoidable. Just get it done before the train leaves the station. Manage your time.

In Kairos you manage timing. You look for the right moment to strike.

How's the energy? Are people overloaded? What do leadership prioritize and care about? What's the unspoken frustrations? What stories are being told? Are people's pain points painful enough? Are there existing waves you can ride? Any recent major events you can leverage to your advantage? Strategic shifts?

You listen. You observe. You take the pulse of the organization.

With Chronos and Kairos time come dilemmas and decisions you must make.

Leadership announces a new change initiative you are asked to lead. They want to see early wins within two months. But people have change fatigue and are skeptical. They look at this as "extra work". It doesn't seem like the right moment.

What do you do? Do you keep pushing, or wait until they feel the pain themselves? Will everyone ever be ready? Rather than waiting for the right moment, can you create the right moment? People may feel ready when they see someone else went first.

If you were asked to manage timing instead of time, what would you do differently the next quarter?

What would happen if we in our planning and reviews asked more of "Is now the right time?" instead of "Are we on track for this?" or "When will it be delivered?"

How can we bring Kairos time into our corporate rhythms?

Bedre produktledelse er ikke at du skal ha rett hele tiden eller å ha svaret på alt, men å finne ut i tide at vi tar feil. Ta ned risikoen. Kostnaden ved å bruke månedsvis på å lage feil ting er større enn kostnaden ved å undersøke underveis.

Bedre produkter oppnår noe som gagner virksomheten, og for å komme der må det bli tatt i bruk av noen. Vi må derfor så tidlig som mulig finne ut om vi er på sporet av noe som faktisk vil bli brukt. Hvis det går for lang tid mellom hver gang vi har kontakt med brukerne, har vi sjeldnere muligheten til å justere kursen. Da risikerer vi å jobbe med feil problem eller feil løsning.

Bedre produktledelse er å jobbe med et produkt over tid hvor vedlikehold, feilretting, forbedring og nyutvikling skjer samtidig. Drift er ikke noe som skjer etterpå, det er noe som skjer hele tiden. Å kutte ned til beinet, og så løfter du det med et prosjekt, og så kutter du ned til beinet igjen, og så løfter du det opp igjen med et prosjekt, det er veldig dyrt i det lange løp.

Bedre produkter blir aldri ferdig. Brukerne får nye behov og vaner, konkurrenter dukker opp, nye lover blir vedtatt. Verden står ikke stille, så da kan ikke produktet stå stille.

Bedre produktledelse er å vite hva du vil oppnå og hvorfor. Vet vi ikke det så vet vi heller ikke om det vi gjør skaper verdi. Hva er problemet som skal løses? Hva er det som skal være annerledes hvis vi lykkes? Hvilke typer gevinster ønsker vi å skape?

Bedre produkter er laget av fagdisipliner som jobber og er satt sammen for å få en bedre forståelse av problemet vi skal løse få øye på antagelser, undersøke dem og komme med bedre løsninger. Klarer vi å lage dette? Klarer brukerne å bruke det? Får brukerne noe ut av det? Lønner det seg for virksomheten?

Bedre produktledelse er å våge å prioritere, ta veddemål, på tross av usikkerhet. En blanding av lavthengende frukter og større satsinger. En kvalitativ beslutningsprosess, ikke et regnestykke. Et samarbeid mellom nøkkelpersoner.

Hva er bedre produkter og produktledelse for deg?

"Bedre produkter" av Ida Aalen

"We need to prioritize better...", a phrase often heard when costs increase and resources become more constrained.

Ah, so it's that simple?

Prioritization means arranging or doing things in a particular order, while prioritization is the process of doing so. It’s obvious what it is, but not how to do it.

Everything we prioritize is a bet, meaning we make an informed decision to allocate our resources to one thing over another, despite uncertainty.

This is necessary because there will always be more work than there is capacity to execute. No matter how many talented people you have, you’ll never have enough to do everything. If everything is important, then nothing is important.

Unfortunately, there’s no magical formula for how to prioritize, and it’s rarely as simple as a mathematical exercise.

It's a constant balancing act between running and improving what already exists, pursuing new strategic bets, and weighing short-term gains against long-term impact.

There are many frameworks and techniques, but for me, it boils down to a collective judgement. A discussion between relevant disciplines, key people, and stakeholders.

Evaluate ideas in relation to each other. Compare and contrast. Which of these do we believe will have the biggest impact on our strategy, customers and business? How much effort and resources do we think it will require from us? Can we afford it as things look today? What are the consequences of not doing it? How confident are we in our assumptions?

To prioritize, we need filters. This is where strategy and goals come into play. What is it that you want to achieve, and what is the strategy to get there? If this is unclear, the prioritizations will suffer.

Without a clear sense of direction, it becomes difficult to determine what tasks are most important.

Where does it get difficult? If you want to do more of something, you must do less of something else. Pausing or stopping ongoing initiatives is crazy hard. It’s always easier to spin a story explaining why continuing is better than stopping.

Our cognitive biases and lack of clear thinking doesn't help. Prioritization has a human element. It's emotional. Our feelings take over.

We prefer to keep things the way they are.

We feel uncomfortable with loosing what we have. When something we like is (or threatens to be) taken away, we often value it higher, aka Loss Aversion.

We have a tendency to continue because we have invested resources in it, such as time, money, or competency, aka Sunk-Cost Fallacy.

The scarcer common resources become (money, capacity), the more territorial behavior we get. It's a self-preservation mechanism inherent in all of us.

So what can we do?

First, widen your options. Downgrading one of many is easier than if you only have one or two ongoing. With only one option you become too invested. You take it personally.

You ask yourself "How can I make this work?" instead of "Is there a better way? What else can we do with the same time and money?"

With a portfolio of options and activities, it's easier to step back and look for patterns. Which initiatives repeatedly create value? Where are the dependencies and synergies?

Second, shift your perspectives. It's very hard for us to see the world from outside our own perspective.

An example is the thought exercise Andrew Grove went through with Gordon Moore before committing to making a massive change in Intel's business: "If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think they would do?"

When we think of our colleagues or peers, we see the forest. When we think of ourselves, we get stuck in the trees. Ask yourself, "What would I tell my colleague to do in this situation?"

One of the best tools to get an outside view to improve your prioritization is to get other people's perspectives. But don't share your opinion first. Provide what the person needs to know to give valuable feedback, like what you try to accomplish, and nothing more. 

"What would be your process for prioritizing if you were in my shoes? How would you go about doing it?"

Third, set, in advance, guardrails and "tripwires" to snap us out of autopilot. These are signals that make us reconsider a prioritization. Signals that tell us when to jump and take action.

An artificial deadline is one example of a tripwire. Other examples include performance indicators, budget caps, behavioral patterns, and time-based reviews or check-ins.

Fourth, start talking about the opportunity cost. Limited resources always have alternative uses. Opportunity cost is what you give up when you make a choice. It's the thing you can't have because you picked something else.

The cost of using a limited resource for a specific activity, can be measured as the value or opportunity lost by not using it for a better alternative.

Opportunity cost can challenge the comfort of the status quo and make the cost of inaction more visible. You can highlight that continuing a low-value activity means sacrificing higher-value opportunities.

You can shift the narrative from "stopping an activity" to "investing in something better."

How do you prioritize?

John Deere, the farming technology company, encourage product managers and software engineers from urban areas to actively go out and see farmers in action.

They send their people to a fully-functioning farm set up a few miles from the office to learn more about farming.

This is what it means to be customer centric. Knowing that the most important thing you can do to create great products is to deeply understand your customers.

When you do not understand your users' problems well, you cannot possible define value for them.

In product-led companies, this is baked into the culture.

It's about avoid ending up in the build trap where we measure value by the number of things we produce instead of associating value with the outcomes we want to achieve for our business and users.

Products and services are not inherently valuable. It's what they do for your customer or user that has the value - solving a problem, or fulfilling a need or desire.

• A great product manager understands the market, how the business works as well as the company vision and goals.
• A great product manager has deep empathy for the users of the product.
• A great product manager needs to be strategic enough to help craft the vision of the product and a strategy to get there, but tactical enough to ensure a smooth execution.
• A great product manager works with the team in developing and validating ideas and in marrying business goals with the user goals to achieve value.
• A great product manager says things like "I think the most costly thing we can do is build this product without knowing it's the right product to build. How do I test it and ensure that this is actually what we want? How do I become more confident that we are on the right path before I invest money in this?"

Easy? No. This is a discipline that must be mastered as a career. You need to develop the skill set through experience and practice.

What's the value of water? It depends on how thirsty you are.

Something that is worthless to one person or organization can be of immense value to someone else. Value is in the eye of the beholder.

Value can be the importance, monetary worth or usefulness of something.