🔥Today’s question🔥

“How do you deal with business stakeholders derailing things by throwing last minute new requirements or changes to existing features leading to more instability.”

That’s a great question there.

Answering this question again for all you PMs here ‘cause I figured out every PM needs to know what to do in this situation.

This scenario is a test of your PM thinking skills though. So you need to nail it.✔

Working with stakeholders has never been a smooth journey for me too. They pop up with new requirements in every other meeting inspite of freezing them for the current sprint. Ugh..

Rushing to deadlines is never a great idea especially that you aren’t sure about yourself. 👀

This is what you should do!

1. Understand if what they require actually solves a problem or is just a good to have feature. ‘Cause you cannot afford to waste your precious time!

   
   If it’s a serious problem
   (and has no existing alternative solution)
   

2. Try to understand the complexity of implementing the solution.

3. Brainstorm on how you can solve the problem and how easily you can implement it. Ask deeper questions to stakeholders to identify the problem correctly.

4. Discuss internally with your teams (application/engineering/AI) and get an ETA. Remember to add the buffer time within this ETA to avoid delays!

5. Communicate this timeline to your stakeholders for them to expect their solution.

   
   If it’s a not a serious problem
   (and has some existing alternative solution/workaround)
   

6. Tell them that the solution will be taken up after you deliver your priority items for this sprint.

7. Also tell them, that you will take this issue up, if you do not have any priorities lined up for the next sprint and might even push to a further sprint.

Look at this Prioritization Matrix.

What does it tell you?

It categorizes user stories / issues / features based on the degree of low to high impact and importance.

The left line from bottom to top shows low to high potential impact you could derive from by implementing it.

The bottom line from left to right shows low to high importance of the feature to the users.

For new PMs, this matrix is a life saver when they can’t decide on prioritizing issues at hand.

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Happy weekends!
Areesha ❤️