How to Say No to the CEO
Imagine you’re in a giant board room. Twenty people in dark suits sit around a mahogany table. You are up at the front talking about your newest product that’s about to be released. The CEO from the far end of the conference table says “I think we should add a Super Cool Feature before we release this.” Everyone at the table nods in agreement because the executives always agree with the CEO. You’re thinking to yourself “Super Cool Feature would not only delay the release, but it’s also a terrible idea.” Everyone is waiting for your response. What do you say?
First of all, do they even still make mahogany conference tables that seat twenty? When’s the last time you wore a suit? While this situation doesn’t usually happen with suits around a mahogany conference table, it does still happen. You may find yourself in this situation, affectionately called the “Swoop and Poop”, where you’re almost ready to launch and an executive swoops in at the last minute and poops all over your idea. Or maybe the CEO is always asking for new features, or changes their mind constantly, or is generally trying to control your roadmap. These are just examples of the many interactions you might have with the CEO (or another high ranking executive, depending on the size of your company), but they don’t have to be scary if you follow a few basic techniques.
1. Understand the CEO’s Objectives and Metrics
The CEO has goals too, they’re just different from yours. While you’re worrying about daily active users, or feature adoption, or release deadlines, the CEO is likely worrying about operating expenses, or annual recurring revenue, or employee attrition rates. In order to engage with the CEO in a meaningful way that enables you to make your case that adding Super Cool Feature just before the big release might not be the best idea, you need to understand what metrics the CEO is focused on. Discovering what these metrics are requires some work. Maybe you can ask your manager or maybe you have a skip level meeting with your manager’s manager and can ask them what KPIs the company uses to measure success. Make friends with someone in the Finance department and ask how your product affects the bottom line. Or maybe you can talk to the CEO directly. What keeps them up at night? How can you help?
At one company where I worked, a VP-level stakeholder was very concerned about how quickly our product was rolled out to new customers and wanted us to take some shortcuts on our data quality to get the product rolled out faster. The rollout process took time because we needed to collect and process customer data before we could show reports in our UI. But if we took shortcuts on data quality, that would put customer trust at risk, which is very difficult to build back once it’s lost. I asked him why it was a concern, and it turned out that customers were not required to pay us until they had full report access, and if this takes too long, it’s bad for the company’s balance sheet. So not only did we work on speeding up the data quality checks, but we also revamped the onboarding process. We created more milestones earlier in the rollout process so that we could provide value earlier and also collect payment earlier, without sacrificing data quality.
2. Use Evidence, Not Opinions
One concerning part of the CEO’s statement at the beginning of this article is “I think we should add a feature.” Any time you have only opinions to back you up, the HiPPO wins. In this case HiPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.” What you need is evidence: hard facts, numbers, and direct customer quotations that lead everyone to your side of the debate.
I ran into this situation early in my career, where the CTO at my company really wanted social media-type components in our file sharing service, like peer ratings, contact lists, and chat functionality. We were planning to implement at least some of these down the road, but we didn’t feel that it was MVP scope. This was back in 2008 (I just dated myself there) and Facebook was the next big thing, so I understood why the CTO wanted these features. But we felt there were more important features that improved search, upload, and download of the files being shared. So we did a survey of 200 customers and asked them to rank the features they wanted out of a list that included our proposed features and the CTO’s features. Turns out we were right. Our features were ranked highest and the CTO’s features were ranked lowest. This evidence was irrefutable, and we were allowed to continue with the original plan.
3. Don’t Say “No”, Say “Not Now”
When the CEO or another important stakeholder asks you to add a certain feature, usually it’s not a terrible idea, it just isn’t in the immediate plans. There are lots of good ideas, and we can’t possibly do all of them right now. Instead of saying “no,” you can talk about all the other things you are doing and you can even ask the CEO to help you prioritize this new feature against all the other work you’re doing. Help the CEO understand your limited resources and get them used to the idea of “trade offs,” where adding a new feature means you have to kick something else off the list. Not only will asking the CEO to prioritize help you understand how important the CEO thinks this feature is compared with other features you’re working on, it will hopefully get them thinking generally about how important all of their requests are.
A good way to stay ahead of this is to consistently help the CEO understand your current roadmap and strategy. What are you working on now, next, and later? Why did you choose that order? What key business objectives will your roadmap support and what are the milestones? If you make sure to include features the CEO has asked about in the “later” category, it will show that you are listening, and your technical strategy will help them understand why it’s not in the “now” category.
By the way, you don’t have to wait until you get all the requests to include them. One technique I’ve used, which is particularly helpful if you’re joining a new company or working with new stakeholders, is to have a “wish list brainstorm.” This is a meeting where all the stakeholders get to say all the things they want in the product. It’s a listening session that helps you figure out where all the problems are, according to your internal stakeholders, and lets them get everything off their chests in one concentrated exercise. From there you can categorize the asks into thematic buckets, add customer research and other internal interviews, and then form your product strategy and roadmap to incorporate the wish list, more or less. This makes the CEO and other stakeholders feel like part of the process, but at the same time allows you to create a roadmap you feel confident about.
At the end of the day, the CEO doesn’t have to be a scary person in a suit at the end of a long conference table. As long as you get to know what the CEO cares about, use evidence instead of opinions, and bring them into the roadmapping process, it will be easier than you think to say “no” to the CEO.
Melissa Appel has 20 years of product management experience at companies of a variety of sizes in a variety of industries. She is currently an Associate Director of Product Management at Wayfair, focusing on end-to-end processes and tools for warehousing and fulfillment. She has been a member of BPMA since 2016 and is part of the Mentorship committee.
