Dear Leah #5: None of my suggestions to leadership seem to survive

How to get things approved

“Dear Leah” is my advice column, in which I tackle questions from the community. It’s a perk intended for my paid subscribers to get more focused, operational advice.

Submit your own questions to dearleah@productea.io or write them in the comments.

In this one, I try to highlight the most common mistakes I encounter when other product managers or leaders are pitching ideas to me or their leadership team.

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Dear Leah,

I’m a senior PM in a tech startup and I struggle to making my ideas go through to Leadership and i feel like that they are disappointed in my performance.

No matter what I do, it feels like my Ideas are just plainly ignored or just rejected. I’m insecure about my own skills as a result and wanted to ask whether you have any tips in this regard?

Sam

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Hey Sam,

Without more context, I can’t tell whether the issues are on a personal level, but the six most common issues I encounter when I’m being presented with Ideas from internal stakeholders are:

1. Not size appropriate: I might like a specific suggestion but they are not at the correct flight height. Good leaders will help you find the correct person to land a specific idea with, but if you suggest something that is a huge drain inside the company and above the person you’re talking to, then they might simply not know what to do with your idea. In that case, you’re communicating something that is above their pay grade.
   The other way is also problematic; if you come up with ideas that sound good but just don’t have a big enough lift as the best possible outcome that you can imagine, then you’re just wasting time.
   A good rough number I use is: “Don’t bother with anything that doesn’t affect 15% of my responsibility”. For a CEO in a 10m ARR company, that means your Idea should have the best outcome of at least 1.5m ARR. For a head of product at the same company, it would be less as you go “down.”
   If that’s too abstract for you, ask directly what a good opportunity looks like, size-wise.
   That doesn’t mean that all your ideas should be above 1.5 million. It just means: “Don’t bother the CEO with minor ideas; you have middle management for that.”
   

2. Not evaluatable: A good summary is worth a thousand words. Before you slam a wall of text into anyone’s face, always make sure you have a simple summary at the beginning.
   If you are one of 10 PMs in a company that brings up five ideas per quarter, then that CPO has to evaluate 50 ideas per quarter and balance them with each other.
   That’s incredibly hard if you can’t summarize:
   If whatever your idea is to trigger the question “Why do you believe that?” then you’re on the right track; that’s not a criticism; that’s a request for validation.
   Ideas where I have to ask more just to understand what you are trying to say usually get ghosted or rejected. “If we do A, we might be able to generate next year between B and C $ within this time” is a powerful statement, especially if you can also condense why you believe this to be true and what the next step is.
   For instance: “Out of 20 churned customers last year, we saw an overrepresentation of this particular issue; we should look into it further.”