Product Managers often get pulled in several directions and everything feels urgent. How do we work with our Exec team to help narrow down what we focus on?

If your company uses Objective Key Results (OKRs) or other goal setting framework; that is the best guide for a PM to leverage. Tie your product/projects to company priority and use that to guide what are urgent and important to prioritize.

However, this alone is not going to be sufficient, as new things could emerge that you need to respond to - a competitor announcement, customer request, a new technology unlock etc. You need to have a framework to respond. 

As a PM, I would encourage you to always have a running list of your priorities. When something comes up, then with your manager or exec team, have an open discussion on where this new request fits in the priority - does it take #1#1 or #10#10 spot. Once expectations are aligned, then it's easier for you as PM to continue to stay focused.

This comes down to transparency. See my later response on this topic. Make sure everyone on the exec team clearly understands the priorities, and more importantly, the non-priorities. When they make an urgent ask, make sure they understand the tradeoffs relative to the more durable well understood priorities. 

1. You need to educate the execs on those several directions. Often, folks assume that execs know (or remember) about those different directions. Be very clear and keep an ongoing education about the context of your situation - it is a part of your role to provide people with the right context and then remind them of it. A part of this is learning to say "no" to execs, which is an answer they are absolutely willing to hear - with a good justification, which describing the context often provides.
2. You often may think of your ability to focus as something you need to earn, not take for granted. In the context of the overall business complexity, execs often want "more and faster", so your path to getting the desired focus needs to lie through showing them that getting that focus will deliver results faster, and have a great impact on business. To do that, you need a clear plan that justifies your area of focus (and has specifics about what the impact is going to be).

I have personally struggled with this many times in my career and most organizations do. The executives should be able to articulate the overall company goals and targets quarter by quarter (these are commonly OKRs or MBOs) This is the main method I like to rely on to have executives streamline priorities so the product organization can contribute meaningfully.

Secondarily, as PM is it essential you identify the business case for your roadmap. What will be the business impact if you can successfully launch everything on your plan? Once you have that data point, it can be very useful when expressing trade-offs with leaders. You can say "yes, although I would need to trade off a feature that will help unlock (X # of deals, $XM ARR, # of new logos)". The executive team can then acknowledge if this work will benefit the company more or not.

This is the constant battle of product management! To work with your executive team and narrow the focus, you should:

• Always align on the goals - constantly make sure everyone understands and agrees on the strategic objectives. Write them down, so it’s easy to refer back.

• Make data-driven decisions - use qualitative and quantitative data to showcase how you are prioritizing projects with the most impact

• Keep an open mind - when new ideas surface, dig deeper to understand the “why” behind them. You may uncover some new potential for impact. 

• Meet regularly - Schedule regular reviews with executives and stakeholders to revisit goals, assess risks, and adapt as needed

I think first of all, we need to have our own opinions of relative priorities. There are so many frameworks out there on prioritization. For me, it always comes down to alignment with strategy, alignment with customer problems, and relative effort level.

When communicating with executives, it’s important to bring our tradeoff decisions and rationale to them. Resources are not infinite so there is only so much a team can do. It’s pretty straightforward to force a conversation like: based on team capacity, we can work on A, B, and C. This is why we prioritized A, B, and C. We can re-prioritize D above them, but that means we are going to lose blah blah. Are we ok with that tradeoff?