PB 6/9: Life on the Decision Factory floor

'Feature factory' is so 2023! Take data. Turn it into decisions. Rinse and repeat!

Two wonderful nuggets from my reading over the Summer.

First from Simon Napier Bell’s Black Vinyl, White Powder - his 2001 history of British pop and rock told through the prism of sex and drugs - this description of Pink Floyd’s Syd Barratt

“..he appeared on-stage with his hair slicked down by a jarful of Brylcreem mixed with a bottle of crushed Mandrax tablets. Under the hot lights, the Brylcreem melted and the mixture slide down over his face, feeding his lips with an endless drip of downers which he happily licked through the show.”

I won’t comment - other than to say they book is a great read, and reminds you that there’s more to music than staring at a Ticketmaster queue screen for 24 hours.

On a slightly more work-related note, however, there was this from strategy consultant and academic, Roger Martin’s A New Way to Think

At desks and in meeting rooms, every day of their working lives, knowledge workers hammer away in decision factories. Their raw materials are data, either from their own information systems of from outside providers. They produce lots of memos and presentations full of analyses and recommendations. They engage in production processes - called meetings - that convert this work to finished goods in the form of decisions. Or they generate rework: another meeting to reach the decision that wasn’t made in the first meeting

I love that description of the workplace as a ‘decision factory’ (‘feature factory’ is so 2023!)- for a whole host of reasons, but mainly…

1. ..because as product managers and product teams we are nothing more, or less, than the sum of the decisions we make and the decisions we help to get made by others.

2. ..because it makes you realise that as a PM you are just a cog in a bigger decision making machine (ie: we’re not that different to other functions…let’s get over ourselves!).

3. ..because if you frame our work as a ‘factory’ - it forces you to think about factors such as efficiency and constraints and wasted work. Decision making is a highly repeatable process; even if you can’t automate it, you can definitely optimise it.

I’ve written before about better decision making; and I’m not claiming any great originality by focussing on it.

There’s Jeff Bezos’s famous (well, in this context) description of Type 1 and 2 decisions; the D.E.C.I.D.E framework - which started in healthcare (here) and I quite liked this S.P.A.D.E (Setting, People, Alternatives, Decide, and Explain) framework. In one of Lenny’s podcasts earlier in the summer, Kevin Yien suggested keeping a decision log.

Each entry should include the date, the decision made, the rationale behind it, and any expected outcomes. For example, if you decide to implement a new feature, note why you made that choice and what you anticipate will happen. Set a calendar reminder every three to six months to revisit and evaluate the outcomes of your past decisions. Reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and why.

Which I’m sure is a really sensible and valuable thing to do…but, you know …life is short…

We are the decisions we make

Going back to my point 1: We are just the sum of the decisions we make or get made. And that simple fact often gets lost in the screed of podcasts, newsletters, books, linked in posts and other good stuff about product management that can hit you on a daily basis and often make our job seem a whole lot more complicated than it actually is.

Scope. Strategy. Roadmapping. These are all just decisions - riffs on prioritisation. You have to look at the options; and use the best information available along with some clear success criteria to pick a path forward.

If you want to get better as a product manager - at whatever level - just ask yourself what are the main decisions you have to make; and then how can you make them more effectively.

Nine times out of 10, the answer will revolve around including the right people (which isn’t the same as everyone who wants to be included); being clear about what you’re trying to achieve; and then developing the confidence to make the actual decision based on the information available and move on.

Then rinse and repeat.

Decisions Made x Time - Biases = Judgement

The more decisions we make - or that we get made - the better we get at it. And given we are the sum of our decisions: the better we get at our job.

Partly because we hone our process, partly because we get to see the consequences of the decisions we’ve made in the past - and we learn what works, and also because we start to pattern match between different scenarios.

I know I scoffed at the idea of keeping a journal - but the principle is a good one. Every decision is something we can learn from.

We learn about how to mitigate the biases that exist in both us as individuals, and in various processes (the bible on this is Max Bazerman’s utterly excellent but not exactly snappily titled: Judgement in Managerial Decision Making (look for a copy on eBay!).

Being part of the machine

A lot of the biases that Bazerman points to are straight out of the behavioural psychology text book (our inability to understand probability; how the way data is framed can affect us) but there is also another bias: Product Knows Best.

And this brings me to my points 2 and 3, and the whole theme of Roger Martin’s quote (which, by the way, I have yanked totally out of context - and is part of anessay about something completely different to this): we sit in this much bigger decision factory. We are part of a machine; and we crank out decisions just like everyone else. The real way to succeed, as a product manager or team, is to understand the machine as a whole - and how you can help it be more effective.

One of the slight delusions with product management is that we think we are the machine; and everything we do is somewhere on the complexity scale between brain-surgery and nuclear fission.

The way for everyone else to succeed, therefore, is for them to understand us. (whoever coined the term ‘productsplaining’ summed it up perfectly).

But, you would never think that..would you?

Anyway - tea break is over. It’s time to get back to the factory floor…and start turning data into decisions!

A bit about me..

So, I had a great Summer and totally failed to do the things I set out to do. My amazing course on setting a strategy for your product career is half written; but a long way from live; and I got half way through moving from Substack to ConvertKit and bottled it (in the end all I achieved was changing the font on Substack - pretty impressive in only 8 weeks!).

I did however start an interim CPO role at a great workplace training business: QA - which is keeping me (very) busy for most of the week. But fear not..I’m going to keep going with the Bugle on a Friday!