Is there a way… ?

Yes. I don't know. Maybe. No.

Those are the possible answers to a product question that begins with "Is there a way... ?"^* and none of them are probably very useful to you in a vacuum. To give you a useful answer when the product team gets asked this, we end up having to spend time asking you more questions to get to the bottom of why you're asking it in the first place. It makes it harder for us to understand what the customer wants and to deliver a solution to you, so I'd like to ask a favor: please don't ask this question to the product team.

Instead, what I (and I suspect most other product folks) love is when we work together to solve the actual problem each answer entails. Here’s how.

Yes.

If you're wondering if there's a way to do something, and the answer is yes, it means I’ve already built it but you don’t know about it. Why else would you be asking me? This is a pretty big problem, but it’s not a question for the product team yet; questions about existing functionality are best directed to your own team first to see if the people around you know the answer already.

Where this gets interesting to the product team is what happens after you find out the answer is yes, because it means I haven’t documented my own features very well. One of the most valuable pieces of feedback I can get is you telling me that you had a problem and weren’t even aware I had built a solution. I get a chance to right my wrong and create all the product marketing or training content to make sure everyone knows my feature exists and how to use it. You get a grateful PM who now owes you a favor. Everybody wins.

Replace: “Is there a way…?”

With: “I didn’t know this feature existed.”

If you've asked around though and nobody knows one way or the other, then you've got the next scenario on your hands.

I don't know, maybe.

This is one of the prime scenarios to come to the product team, because it means there's some functionality that is so unclear in the product that nobody knows if or how it works. Further, it means there's probably no documentation on it either, which means the support team is in the dark. The product team wants very badly to know about this. The best way to present this case is with evidence, such as, "Here's a video/screenshot of Customer A, they want to do X, but they get to this page and get stuck because they don't know what to do. They asked me how to do Y but I don't know either and couldn't figure it out after trying Z."

There’s a couple critical things I want to know. The first is what real-world problem the customer was trying to solve, so I can think about whether the product can currently solve it. The second is what you’ve tried so far, because it gives me a very important look at user behavior to see how people are working around the problem right now.

Once I know these things, I can hopefully answer whether or not the functionality exists. If it does, then you've also given me enough context to understand how I can make its existence more obvious and usable, using language that clearly links the problem and workarounds to the product.

Replace: “Is there a way…?”

With: “Our customer has this problem, here’s what we’ve tried, and here’s where we’re stuck.”

If the functionality doesn't exist though...

No.

The customer has a problem but we don’t have a solution - now you've got a customer request. All the same context as before is important to help me understand the problem, but when there’s no feature, my challenge becomes prioritizing a solution. To do that, what I really need is to weigh how much value I can create if I build a solution against the consequences if I ignore it. This is where metrics and strategy and business goals need to get involved. What percent of users with this problem churn, and how quickly? How much revenue are we missing out on until this exists? Are we losing deals because our competitors can do this? How much time or money could we save our users or ourselves? Are we failing our company mission by not solving this?

Replace: “Is there a way…?”

With: “Our customers have this problem and it’s worth this much to solve it.”

A note to my fellow PMs

Some teams may not have the time or ability to function like this, and that’s fine. It’s not ideal, but I’ve found the best way to handle these sorts of questions in the moment is to respond with a question of your own:

What is important about this question to you?

Do not ask why - people are awful at explaining why. It has to start with what. Responding with this question will tend to lead the conversation straight towards the real world problems, the value proposition, the workarounds, and all the other good stuff you need to make good decisions as a PM.

Footnote

*- Don’t be cheeky and try to cheat by disguising the question. “Is it possible to… “ and “Can I do…” and other permutations like that all still count. I see what you did there.