A few months ago, I wrote about Urgency and importance. In that post I talked about the 4 types of priorities, but today I want to focus on the urgent and important. The fires you have to put out now.

As a manager, you’re going to be putting out a lot of fires. You won’t have the capacity to keep stamping them all out as they come up. Some problems cause more problems, and if you run towards the pain, you can put out the fires that cause the biggest strain on your team.

Where’s the fire?

In order to prioritize the fires to put out, you have to know where they are first.

The problems you know

Obviously you have a list of problems that you already know about. They’ve probably been scratching away at some part of your brain and you feel a strong need to get them out of the way.

I keep a running document of the problems I’m aware of in the company. If it’s better handled by another team, I just send them a message with the context I have so they can prioritize it in their backlog. If my team is best able to handle it, I’ll get it into our backlog and prioritized.

If it’s not directly tied to our product development work (like something interpersonal or related to an individual’s career progression), I’ll bring it up in 1:1s with my boss or in a quick chat with our people team to decide on next steps.

The problems your team knows

So you’ve identified some problems and prioritized them. You’re not done yet. Consider what’s outside your field of view. Maybe the people on your team have identified a whole other set of issues that need to be dealt with. Someone wants a promotion, a low performing team member is dragging down morale, someone directly working in product development has noticed a bug, who knows?

These are the types of issues that you may or may not hear in daily standups, 1:1s, department meetings, or wherever else. First, ask yourself if you’ve created a psychologically safe environment for people to share these issues and concerns with you. If you can get these insights from everyone on your team easily, then chances are you’re doing a good job. If getting this sort of feedback is like pulling teeth, it’s worth investing time in improving psychological safety or active commitment.

The problems the other teams know

My team has a long standing goal of becoming as customer focused as we can be. Aside from gaining customer insights directly, we’ve also been working to work more collaboratively with other product development pods, as well as the revenue side of the company to gain insights we otherwise wouldn’t have visibility into. By collecting information from sales and customer success, we’re able to quickly see what our existing customers are having difficulty with or what could be costing us the most deals. Our collaboration with other teams allows us to identify where our subject matter expertise can enable other teams of mostly software experts, or where they can unlock solutions we would never have thought of. By building stronger relationships with other teams, we’re able to uncover more issues and unlock more value for our users faster.

If you find your team lacking these insights, consider some cross-team teambuilding activities to build connections. Once you’ve broken the ice, encourage your team to have some chats with other teams on their own. I also like to set an example by reaching out early to new hires on other teams and offering to answer questions wherever I can.By building these connections and good will, it will be easier to ask for insights as time goes on.

What are the industry trends?

I like to follow a few newsletters in the industry to stay on top of trends in drug discovery, M&A, or even what’s happening on the regulatory side. Aside from newsletters, I’ll also look for LinkedIn posts or the r/biotechnology subreddit to find trending topics. These industry insights can give me insights into where companies are going with drug discovery, and what factors could be impacting our customers. By looking to the industry as a whole, we can avoid the sample bias that comes from only looking at our existing customers. We get a broader perspective and can solve problems that impact even more users.

Always be on the lookout for new publications or LinkedIn connections you can make to get a broader picture of the industry.

What’s changed in the landscape?

Do you remember what you were doing when ChatGPT was first released? Probably not, but as time went on, it became ubiquitous. Sometimes something outside your industry changes how the whole world works. When I first read High Output Management, I had a little laugh about the forward talking about how electronic mail was going to revolutionize business. Looking back on the last few years with ChatGPT and generative AI, that’s probably the same feeling.

Don’t focus too much on your industry alone. Read the headlines every now and then to see if there’s any major shifts that have happened in the world.

How to fight the fires

Share what you’ve learned

If you see something interesting, and it’s not on your team to action it, share it. In our office Slack we have channels to share industry news, items that may be relevant to certain teams, or even excerpts of what we’re reading. By sharing more information, people will see you as a source of insights and your opinion will carry more weight in higher level conversations.

Don’t let it get to your head. Just because you have the ability to be the loudest voice in the room, doesn’t mean you should be talking 90% of the time. If you stop learning, you’ll be back where you started pretty fast.

Build connections

Do what you can to build connections with other teams or people out in the industry. You don’t need to be slimey or salesy, just offer insights to people wherever you can. The majority of people will reciprocate.

It’s important to encourage (but not demand) the same behavior in your team. If more information is being shared across the company, you can prevent silos from developing and it will allow your team to make decisions faster.

Get the team motivated to work together

Once you and your team are an insight generating machine that’s constantly sharing new ideas, all that energy needs to be focused. When your team sets out on delivery cycle, you need to set a goal that explains what the team is trying to accomplish, why it’s the most important thing, and what the intended impact on the customer is. A good rallying cry ensures that the insights are put to good use and that the team is focused on the right thing.

Prioritize your work

The work should never be done and the insights should never stop coming. Keep building out your backlog with other tasks that are valuable for users and aligned with the company’s objectives.

Wrapping Up

One of the problems with having more fires than you can put out, is that you’ll have to let some of them burn for a while. There will always be fires, there will always be pain points. But by running towards the pain, you can prevent the fires from spreading out of control. A well prioritized backlog allows you to see which pain to run towards.