Handling Options

As a product team, we constantly face more options than we can possibly act on.
Feature requests, strategic goals, bugs, innovations, research insights, hypotheses—some pushed onto us, others sparked by curiosity. All seemingly important. All competing for our attention.

This abundance creates friction.
Between focus and ambition.
Between team capacity and stakeholder expectations.
Between strategic clarity and day-to-day noise.

We try to tame it with prioritization tools. But too often, we end up stuck.

The idealized version?
That the product team itself defines all options.
No outside noise. Just a clear strategy, clear problems, and full autonomy to figure out solutions.
Sounds great. Rarely happens.

In reality, options don’t care where they come from—and that’s a good thing.
Drawing a hard line between “us” (the product team) and “them” (stakeholders) is a dead end.
Great ideas can come from anywhere.

The real problem?
Options arrive on different flight levels.
A feature request might drop in without context and crash your roadmap.
A research insight might raise more questions than it answers.
A business idea might lack feasibility—or a customer problem might lack urgency.

Clarity emerges when we unpack the options, instead of fighting them:

• What future are we trying to shape?

• What outcome are we aiming for?

• What’s blocking us? What’s still uncertain?

• What could we try?

• If everything seems relevant—what’s next?

The goal isn’t to choose faster.
It’s to connect the dots and make better sense of the mess.