How do you prioritize and manage requests from various stakeholders across the business?

There are a few different frameworks that can come in handy here, but my go to method usually involves evaluating impact over effort - where high impact, low effort requests usually top my priority list. That said, prioritization should also take into account the goals of the business and how that ladders down to your team goals.

I'd also be cautious of positioning you and/or your team too much as request takers. Rather, work towards partnerships with internal stakeholders that take your teams goals and their goals into account and you work towards prioritizing initiatives that serve both your teams needs.

And last bit of advice is to be comfortable thoughtfully saying no to requests that aren't aligned to your teams priorities or aren't high impact.

I’ve found that the biggest challenge with Product Marketing prioritization is that stakeholders from across the company lack visibility into what’s being requested across the company, how requests are prioritized, and what’s realistic for PMM to address with existing capacity. This lack of visibility often results in too many requests making it onto PMM’s plate and stakeholders feeling that PMM is either not delivering on their requests or doing a subpar job trying to keep all the plates spinning. To help counter this, I recommend taking a transparent approach to prioritizing requests:

1. Establish a Clear Intake Process: Begin with a standardized intake process. This could involve a form that captures essential details such as the description of the request, the person making the request, any time-sensitive needs, and, most importantly, the business impact of the request.

2. Ensure Visibility and Transparency: Once the requests are gathered, provide visibility into the requests, team capacity, and backlog. Utilizing tools like Asana or other project management applications can be instrumental in tracking and managing these requests effectively.

3. Share and Align on Prioritization Criteria: Clearly communicate your prioritization criteria to key stakeholders. Take time to explain the “why” behind your approach to prioritization and ensure there is an understanding and agreement on the process from primary stakeholders, including sales, product, customer success/operations, and senior leadership. In particular, I would try to highlight the business impact of different asks and how this affects prioritization.

4. Adjust Prioritization with Stakeholder Input: Be prepared to reshuffle priorities as necessary, but ensure that any changes are made with explicit agreement from key stakeholders. In cases where there is a tie in prioritization, senior leadership should resolve the conflict based on the company’s direction and priorities.

5. Escalate for Additional Resources if Needed: If critical projects are at risk of being dropped, this is an ideal time to provide leadership with visibility into the backlog. Use this opportunity to advocate for additional resources and headcount to ensure that important projects are adequately supported.

Prioritizing and managing requests from various stakeholders across the business requires:

• Understanding what’s best for the business. Prioritizing what’s best for the business is the best way to get stakeholder buy-in.

• Determining what’s important vs. what’s urgent. While it’s easy to get caught up prioritizing the most urgent requests that come in, that can lead to spending all your time just playing whac-a-mole with urgent requests; there’s always something else urgent that requires your attention. This leaves little to no time to prioritize work that’s actually important– i.e., the work that will actually move the needle for the business. Make sure you prioritize what’s most important, and fill any remaining time with urgent requests, prioritized by their impact on the business.

• Ensuring stakeholders have broad visibility into what you’re prioritizing. At the end of the day, everyone should want what’s best for the business. So when stakeholders see the high-priority, important work that you’re working on, they’ll better understand where their requests fit in the lineup.