How to communicate tradeoffs so leaders will listen

Tara Seshan, a former Stripe and Watershed product leader, shares a playbook for presenting product tradeoffs so leadership actually makes a decision rather than defaulting to "do both." The post covers framing techniques such as public priority stack-ranking, steelmanning requests, anchoring to company goals, projecting long-term outcomes, and recommending an opinionated solution. It also flags common tradeoff traps.

01Key takeaways

• Repeat your priorities and strategy often so that new requests are evaluated against a shared, visible list.
• Steelman an incoming request before the meeting to uncover blind spots and avoid being surprised by new information.
• Frame tradeoffs in terms of company goals first, since leadership thinks about company outcomes before team goals.
• Predict short- and long-term consequences of a decision so leaders can see the full cost of each option.
• Present a clear, opinionated recommendation with explicit options rather than asking leaders to choose from vague alternatives.
• Watch for traps like absorbing many small requests, assuming more engineers will solve tradeoffs, and leaning on frameworks without examining specifics.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.