How to tame the HiPPO

As product managers, we have all been there. Whether it is coming from sales, the CEO or simply our largest client, we are forced to compromise our roadmap based on the opinion of the Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HiPPO in the room). Its frustrating and it often takes companies down a dangerous route. I have also seen it across every organization I have worked with through the years. So I have worked to develop a way to tame the HiPPO. I use math.

There are definitely times where you have to compromise your vision and roadmap as a product manager...after all, revenue and sometimes career protection is a must. That said, having a strong logical argument and a strong statistical basis for your prioritization is key to making sure that everyone understands the tradeoffs when the HiPPO demands a course.

So, here is how you make this work.

First, I score every requirement by a number of different ways.

1. Business Impact: how much will solving this problem make an impact on my customer's business?
2. Satisfaction: how happy are the customers with the current resolution to the problem or, in other words, how difficult is the problem to solve today.
3. Opportunity: this is an equation that measures the difference between Impact and Satisfaction and is an easy way to sort the requirements in priority order.
4. Total Requests: how many times have we heard the request from the customer's or market?
5. Effort: essentially the T-shirt sizing of the level of effort on the requirement

Second, I categorize the requirements by a few groupings:

1. Highest Client Tier requesting: I usually use a three tier scoring for my customers
2. Value Category: This puts the requirement in a grouping of key features that customers and prospects use to choose the software.
3. BUDVC: This is an acronym for the type of feature, it stand for Buying, User, Debt, Vision or Competitive feature.

Now I am armed with some information to intelligently discuss the backlog and roadmap. When we get into the discussions with the HiPPO, we can now use our evidence to discuss the idea that they are bringing to the table. Playing that out, it often sounds like this:

HiPPO: So we are agreed, we will get this requirement prioritized right away.

Me: Well, hold on...we have a roadmap. Based on our research our priority is "Request X"

HiPPO: Yes, but this is a new idea and should be prioritized.

Me: Ok, sounds good. Just so we are clear, your idea has an opportunity score of 3, and we have not seen this request before. Request X is a 9, and meets the need of 20 Tier 1 clients who currently have the expectation that we will deliver this with the next release. If we knock this off the list, how do you want to message that to the clients?

At this point, I will typically get into some discussion on the actual impact of the HiPPO's requirement, but it rarely moves the needle on the score. Which then creates a more logical discussion regarding development priorities and how we can slot the HiPPO's idea into the backlog.

How about you? Is your backlog priority ready and how do you handle this discussion?