The Oldest Trick in the Book
“If something comes in, something else has to go out” used to be the guardian of the roadmap. Now that management believes AI removed the bottleneck, it can’t anymore. Here is what you can do instead.
How many times have you said something like OK, but if we do it, something else has to go out?
That’s the oldest trick in the book. We have all used it as our main way of saying no, primarily to management who wants to get everything done and the sooner the better. Product people were always the guardians of the roadmap focus.
But in the new world, where development is no longer a bottleneck (at least as a desire, not necessarily in reality), the old trick doesn’t work any more. If AI writes the code, it can write some more. It’s no longer a problem.
Or so they think. You know it’s not like that. You know that the real pace is much slower than what management expects it to be, and you know that moving the needle requires more than just writing code. Doing everything was never a good idea, and doing everything faster did not turn it into one.
But knowing it (and being right about it) and convincing others are two different things. Honestly, nowadays, I think the battle of “you can’t do everything” is somewhat lost. I do believe, though, that we can still win the war. We just need other means, because what we are used to doing doesn’t work any more.
The advice below reads like a guide — do this and that, but if you read it thoroughly you’ll see that it’s actually a new mindset, and it’s useful way beyond the focus conversation.
The request behind the request
When another request lands on a roadmap that is already full, the natural thing for product people to do is to push back. We know it’s impossible to fit in (or just don’t want to have to deal with yet another non-trivial decision), and the conversation stays at the resource level (can or can’t we do it).
But that thing that just landed on you didn’t arise for nothing.
There is a logical explanation to the request — why this and why now — even if they didn’t say it out loud (or sometimes didn’t think this way themselves). And before we say no (and to say no effectively) we have to understand where they are coming from, and why it makes sense to them.
This is where I recommend a practice called radical listening. It means listening to the other person in order to find where they are right, not in order to prove them wrong or even to evaluate what we think about what they just said.
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When you listen to that, you can also say it back to them and ask if you got it right. Often that alone is enough for the other side to understand their own request better, and what comes back to you is more thought through than what arrived.
What you’re actually pushing back on
Once you find where they are right, you might find yourself in an awkward position. You actually agree with them, at least partially, and it feels bad because you still want to push back.
A CPO I worked with told me about a conflict with his CEO & co-founder. The CEO kept pushing for something, and the CPO kept answering: we can’t do everything. I needed to break that loop. I asked him to ignore resources for a minute. If you had infinite resources, do you agree this is even a good idea? He responded immediately and said it was absolutely a good idea.
So that’s not the part they were disagreeing on, but this important agreement got buried behind the push back conversation.
In your conflicts, strive to understand exactly what you agree and disagree on, and then I recommend saying it out loud clearly so you are aligned on that. Usually what this means is that the disagreement is much smaller than what you originally thought it was, and easier to resolve.
Agreeing with someone you disagree with can feel like giving power to the enemy, but it’s actually the other way around.
It was never about resources
When the CPO said it was absolutely a good idea, I told him, but what you’re actually saying to the CEO (even if you didn’t use these explicit words) is “I don’t want to do this”, and that’s not true. You do want to do it. You have doubts on whether it’s more urgent than what’s already in motion, and whether it should be prioritized over it.
That’s a real question worth debating, but not the one that the original response surfaced. “We can’t do everything” is an answer about resources, whether it fits. Priority asks something else: what matters more right now. And that’s the perspective that leads you directly to focus without talking about engineering resources. It could be about you as a product manager — I want to get X done first so I can make sure nothing gets in the way. It could be about the natural order of things — for example an idea for a later phase with a customer. Of course sometimes it will be worthwhile to shift priorities, but it wouldn’t come from a discussion about resources either.
Remember, it was just the easy reason, and it worked for as long as it did.
But instead of arguing for the principle, it’s much easier to pave the way. Know what you really want to happen, and show them an alternative they can agree to. When they have a path they can say yes to, you rarely need to win the argument about focus at all.
Our free e-book “ Speed-Up the Journey to Product-Market Fit” — an executive’s guide to strategic product management is waiting for you at www.infinify.com/ebook
Originally published at https://infinify.com on September 30, 2026.
