What guidance can you share around communicating effectively with stakeholders, once you've determined you will not be including their product request into your roadmap?

When you decide not to prioritize a stakeholder's request in your roadmap, make sure to:

• Acknowledge and empathize - Recognize their effort and express understanding; they will likely be disappointed, and your empathy will go a long way

• Highlight prioritization process - Explain how decisions are made based on various factors (like cost to build and impact) and organization objectives.

• Provide a transparent explanation - Clearly explain the decision, and what factors went into the decision making process

• Maintain an open channel of communication - Encourage ongoing dialogue, feedback, and potential alternative solutions to their underlying needs

“Saying No” is a soft skill every PM will exercise through his/her career. How to say No is something you will continue to learn and evolve with experience. 

Some guiding principles on when delivering bad news on prioritization:

1. Make your stakeholder part of the decision making journey. Have them part of the early discussions.

2. Give clear & concise reasoning for the decison. If the reasoning is other higher priorities, take time to explain the why either through data or anecdotal feedback.

3. Sometimes, there are requests from stakeholders which might not fit the prioritization framework but solving the problem adds “magical delight” and could be low hanging fruits. Find ways to make those small wins which go a long way in stakeholder management.

Even if you can't address all of your stakeholder's requests, as a product manager or product leader you want to keep a strong relationship here and ensure that they keep coming to you with their needs and ideas as these will help you have the biggest impact in the longer term.

So, your communication here should keep that goal in mind, some simple steps you can take here:

1. Proactively communicate with the stakeholder to tell them where their request landed - very few people ever close the loop and this is very much appreciated

2. Provide context to help them understand what the team is doing and why. e.g., "Our team's mandate this quarter is to improve conversion. As we evaluated all the opportunities, the 3 big swings we are taking are X, Y and Z. We hope that project X will somewhat address what you are looking for, though not exactly. We are excited about the potential for your request ABC and will continue to look for opportunities to address it later this year."