How do you deal with more ideas than you can develop?

Typical Product Manager’s headache: Getting thousands of great ideas while having the capacity to implement maybe a few of them per year. How to survive without pissing off your stakeholders?

Stop me if you heard it before: A stakeholder comes to you with a handsome idea. On the surface it makes sense, the idea-giver has good intentions and it’s in line with your strategy and goals. Great stuff!

Until you realize…

The backlog is full of hundreds of such ideas from various sources and given your future sprint outlook, it really doesn’t make sense to add any more as you will never get there.

What to do?

Tell the truth:
• You lose a potential future idea from the stakeholder
• You have to clearly state that you are not handling your backlog
• You sound negative

Just add it to the backlog:
• You will feel bad about the next thing you will never do
• You will get follow-ups for items that will never come to be
• Finally, the stakeholder realizes what is happening and you will get the downsides from the previous scenario