Bringing New Ideas to the Old Guard

Sometimes, the perfect job isn’t quite perfect. Personalities can clash. Product maturity may not be as represented. Stakeholders can disagree on priorities, and make arbitrary decisions, throwing data out the window in the process. When our dream of data-inspired product decisions turns into a nightmare of hippo (highest paid person’s opinion) driven changes, what can we do to save our product?
As product managers, it is our burden, our responsibility, and sometimes our gift, to identify and engage when we see these issues threatening our products. But how? For most of us, the tools we need to right our capsizing ship are already part of our daily arsenal. We just need to put together a plan to leverage them and get our products back ship shape.