There once was a girl called Andrea Ho who’s favourite word was No! No! No!
This poem is written on a piece of laminated ‘artwork’ at my parents house, decorated with my tiny little two yr old hand prints from pre-school. I can’t remember the rest of the poem, but it’s something along the lines of ‘She’d stamp her foot and shake her head, and yell and shout when put to bed’.
I was a delight.
In my previous post I wrote about how throughout my working career, I’d always made an effort to say yes to opportunities that came my way, even when they terrified me. I still remember the feeling of adrenaline pumping through my veins the day I said yes to speaking at a work conference in front of almost 1000 customers. The thought of it alone chilled me to the bone, but I knew these opportunities didn’t come round often, so I seized them.
However there are only so many hours in a day, and only so much mental and emotional capacity that my brain can cope with.
I learned early in my career that I can’t say yes to everything.
A friend asked recently for tips on “saying no at work”, something which based on the poem about me above, I felt more than qualified to talk on.
I haven’t always have the audacity to scream ‘No!’ at people when ever I disagreed though. After I got over my terrible two’s, and many years later when started my career as a product manager, I went through the usual rounds of putting my hand up for everything, taking on way too much, getting overloaded, overwhelmed and burnt out.
There are a number of tools and skills I learned, which helped me get control of saying ‘no’. These got me through the early years as a junior product manager when I was unsure if this thing I’d just been asked to do, but didn’t have time for, was actually something I should be doing.
Get clarity on roles and responsibilities.
There’s a great playbook for this which we use at Atlassian which you can find here. You need to make sure you understand both your role and responsibilities and those of your team around you. What’s even more important is that you have a shared understanding of it. Write it up as an artefact and refer to it if you feel people are still trying to push you to do things you don’t think you should be doing.
Learn to manage your time better.
Early in my career I was terrible at knowing how much time it took me to do tasks. Estimating how much you can get done in a day, a week or a month is tough when you’re doing a task for the first time. But once you have a feel for it, be honest with yourself about what you know you can confidently commit to, and be conservative if you feel you are close to burning out. It’s always better to under promise and over deliver.
Say ‘no’ early
There’s nothing worse than saying ‘no’ when it’s too late, on the day of or after you were expected to deliver that thing they asked you for. Nothing burns trust more than a broken promise.
Now as a more seasoned product manager, I’ve learned to say no based on priority and impact.
As a growth product manager I have access to both a huge amount of data, and an analyst to help do in depth forecasts of MRR impact for every experiment our team plans to run. As a growth team, our goals are always revenue based, so it becomes black and white when making priority decisions.
When another team or manager asks to pull engineers to work on another feature or project, I bring the conversation back to — what’s the impact of that work? And what’s the revenue impact to my roadmap forecasts if I am down an engineer? If it’s a smaller dollar amount, then it’s a no brainer. There are obviously exceptions from time to time for things that may not bring in money immediately but will deliver huge amounts of customer delight, however delight is what should leads to revenue anyway. Ultimately it’s the same goal.
I apply priority based on impact to my own time as well. If I am asked by my manager or another team to do something I didn’t think was in my remit, or I didn’t have time, I’d either be up front and say “I don’t have time because X is my #1 priority right now, let me know if you disagree”, or try and negotiate the due date. Another option is asking others for help or delegating if there’s someone appropriate.
If all else fails you can send them a meme of a certain grumpy cat who I’ve refrained from referencing by image after googling and finding successful copyright lawsuits by said cat.
