A huge part of executing as a product manager is balancing conflicting priorities. The quesiton: How do you handle conflicting priorities will often be followed by: Tell me about a time you had to balance conflicting priorities from different stakeholders.

I start by baselining on:

1. Alignment with Goal/Vision/Mission

2. Impact on the Users

3. Cost of Not Implementing

4. Technical Order of Operations

Let’s dive into each one:

• Goal: If we are considering multiple requests, I like to check and see if it is aligned with our mission and goal. Most of the time the requests do, but not always.

• Impact on the Users: Is this a solution to high-severity or high-frequency problems?

• Cost: How expensive (cost can be dollars or time) is it to implement? Or what will be the opportunity cost of doing or not doing it.

• Technical Order of Operations: Do we need to build some things that are less attractive first because they lay the foundations on which other things need to be built?

Then be prepared to share how you have applied this framework in your real job.