Product management is a balancing act

As a PM, you’re constantly finding tradeoffs. How do we balance value creation with value extraction? Short-term goals versus long-term goals? There are so many of these types of questions. In product management, balance is everything. To find balance, it takes focus, presence, and practice.

Balance requires awareness of what is on either side of the scale. I find myself constantly asking questions like “On the spectrum from X to Y, where do we want to be?” For example, imagine you are building a new feature. One of the balances you might want to strike is the eternal “MVP” debate:

But so often dichotomies don’t exist; you are never really only balancing just one thing, and it often isn’t the case that you must choose one at the expense of the other. For example, if we are trying to balance business needs vs user needs, maybe a spectrum is the wrong mental model to use (a lot of people use a Venn diagram for this). Ideally, we want to create opportunities that are good for users and good for the business. If we add a second dimension, our “spectrums” becomes chords on a circle:

Each of the balances you try to strike as a PM doesn’t happen in isolation—they interact with each other. Add a third dimension, and now instead of a 1-dimensional spectrum, we’re thinking about balance as coordinates on a sphere:

The final complication I can even imagine visualizing here is a fourth dimension: these balances don’t only interact with each other, they evolve and change over time. Business needs and user needs are constantly evolving, after all. Now, instead of visualizing “balance” as coordinates on a sphere, we are also considering how those balances change over time:

Balance is important. Recognizing what you are balancing is important. And in my opinion, a linear spectrum doesn’t always paint a complete picture when trying to describe what you are balancing.