PM in Practice #2 A senior stakeholder proposes a solution you disagree with. What do you do?
PM in Practice is a series where I share my approach to ambiguous product decisions.
Situations like this can put you under pressure and this is where clarity matters more than confidence.
A senior stakeholder proposes a solution you disagree with. What do you do?
The situation: You are responsible for improving the activation of the product. Activation for new users is lower than expected in the first 7 days. There’s a clear north star metric that you have to move. You have done your homework on the problem, and have shortlisted a few possible solutions.
A senior leader suggests adding a mandatory onboarding flow.
The dilemma: The real question isn’t whose question wins. It’s whether the proposed solution actually addresses the root cause of the low activation.
What would I do?
A proposed solution, even if it is from a senior leader, is always an input. My responsibility here is to evaluate if it would work well to solve the problem.
To get a better understanding of the senior leader’s perspective, I would ask them:
- What is the hypothesis behind adding the onboarding flow?
- What behaviour do we expect to change after adding onboarding flow?
- Which friction point does it address?
There can be multiple user drop-off points in the activation journey and it is my responsibility to prioritise solving the most problematic one to show positive impact on the north star.
Based on the discussion with the senior leader, there would be 3 possible outcomes:
- We agree to test my solution first and shelf the suggested solution
- We align on testing onboarding flow as an experiment
- We build both solutions and run them as experiments
In the end, the winner shouldn’t be the leader or the PM, it should be the product, and that’s what has happened here.
A strong PM protects the integrity of the problem. The goal isn’t to choose the most impressive solution, but the one that actually moves the needle.
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