Earn the No: Try to Make Yes Work First
Before rejecting an idea, sincerely attempt to make it work — then say no with receipts.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 88%
Engineers accumulate scar tissue from maintaining half-baked ideas, which hardens into a reflexive hard no. Iyengar's counter-practice is to route every new idea through a sincere, time-boxed attempt to make it work, and to document that attempt. The no still gets made — but it is earned, evidenced, and doesn't kill a high-reach direction on reflex.
Origin
Developed by Vijay Iyengar as his personal unlearning when he moved from engineering manager to director of product at Mixpanel, after noticing his engineering instinct to answer new ideas with an immediate hard no.
Core principles
- 01Ideas are fragile in their infancy; a hard no can kill an entire direction permanently.
- 02As a product leader, ideas arrive from far more places in the org than they do for an engineer.
- 03The engineering problem-solving brain is an asset — point it at 'how might this work' instead of 'why this won't work'.
- 04No is often the right answer; what matters is that it is reached after an honest attempt, not before one.
- 05The attempt must be sincere, not a performative alternative you were never going to pick.
How to run it
- 1
Catch the reflex
Notice the immediate internal 'no' when a new idea lands, especially if you carry maintenance scar tissue from past half-thought-out projects. Name it as a reflex rather than a judgment.
Pro tip The tell is that the no arrives before you have modelled the idea at all — it is an immune response, not analysis.
- 2
Spend 10 minutes trying to make yes work
Time-box a sincere attempt: how might we make this work? Apply your problem-solving ability to constructing a path, not to enumerating obstacles.
Pro tip Ten minutes is enough for most ideas — the cost is trivial relative to killing a high-reach, high-impact direction.
Watch out Do not run this as theatre. An insincere attempt produces the same reflexive no with a thin justification attached.
- 3
Document how you tried
Write down the paths you explored and where each one broke. This is the artifact that makes the eventual decision legible to the person who brought the idea and to your future self.
- 4
Say no if it is futile — and mean it
If after the honest attempt there is no path, say no. A no reached this way is a good instinct and is fine in a lot of cases. The point was never to say yes more; it was to say no from evidence.
Pro tip Sharing the documented attempt turns a rejection into shared learning, so the same idea doesn't get relitigated every quarter.
In the wild
Iyengar's illustration of why the reflex forms: an engineer is woken three times at 3am by bad ideas already in production, then walks into standup the next morning and is asked to build a new thing. The hard no is emotionally rational — but it is a response to yesterday's pain, not to today's idea.
→ Recognising the mechanism lets engineers hold both truths at once: empathy for the maintenance cost, and a sincere 10-minute look at the new idea before rejecting it.
Moving from engineering leadership to product leadership, Iyengar found the volume and variety of incoming ideas far higher, and that his default hard no was destroying options he had no right to close.
→ He adopted the try-to-make-yes-work practice and says his career would have been better had he learned it sooner.
Common mistakes
Treating the yes-attempt as a checkbox
Going through the motions to justify a no you already made yields nothing. Iyengar is explicit that the attempt must be earnest and sincere, not an exercise in considering an alternative you never intended to take.
Overcorrecting into saying yes to everything
The framework does not abolish no — it relocates it. Saying yes to every idea just recreates the maintenance burden that produced the scar tissue in the first place.
Is it for you?
Best for
Engineers and engineering managers moving into product, and any technical leader whose default answer to new ideas has become a reflexive hard no
Not ideal for
High-volume, low-stakes request triage where a fast filter is the correct tool, or environments already drowning in unfinished commitments
From the transcript
“to get to a no if you ultimately need to get there is is to try to make it work like start try to make…”
“just take 10 minutes to consider the idea just sincerely consider how might we make it work and if at the end of those 10…”
From the episode
An inside look at Mixpanel’s product journey
Vijay Iyengar (Head of Product)