A few years ago, one of the execs of the music service Pandora shared the “Pandora Prioritization Process”—the company's process for deciding what to work on and build.1 The process involved letting stakeholders “buy” the features they wanted from the feature teams until their budget ran out. I had not worked with them, but when I read this, I immediately recognized the complete and utter absence of product strategy and especially focus. Not bad product strategy—literally no product strategy. Combined with their dependence on feature teams and their lack of any sign of true product management,
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