This post was supposed to be about prioritizing as if your life depends on it.

But it turns out that is not the most important lesson that I learned while removing two large dead trees from my backyard.

You see, everything was going as planned until I went to start up the chainsaw.

Standing there with the 56cc gas powered chainsaw in my right hand and the starting rope in my left hand, I looked around at my neighbor who was working the other chainsaw while a couple of his landscaping friends were removing the cut branches.

What the fuck was I doing.

Sure cutting through the trees with a 14,000 RPM chainsaw was going to be the highlight of my weekend, but was I the best person for the job?

The answer is "No". My neighbor and his guys had experience with tree removal so not only would I slow our team down, I would more than likely be flat out dangerous.

That's when it hit me. This is a lot like Product Management.

As a Product Manager you have to know when to step back and lean on your highly skilled experts. They might be your dev team members, your stakeholders, or even your customers, someone out there has more expertise than you.

Seek them out and start asking questions.

Question for Developers: How do you think we should build this? What do you think we should build?

Question for Stakeholders: What do you think the solution the is?

Question for Customers: What's your biggest frustration or pain point? How would you solve it?

While these questions may sound like common sense questions for PM's, I can assure you that they are not and just like an inexperienced DIYer with a chainsaw, not leaning on your experts will slow down delivery or even kill your product.