PB 7/10: 6 rules for better, faster decisions
At the heart of every good product is a set of good decisions. But how do you make them? A deep dive into decision making for product people..
After a few weeks obsessing over TheBestProductStuff.com - it’s essay week! This is a first draft of something I’ve been kicking around for a while. It’s likely to be the source of a number of things over the next few weeks - and the foundations for a whole section on decision making on TheBestProductStuff.
6 Rules for better faster decisions
Good products are the outcome of good decisions. However you ‘do product’; whether working on a strategy or a roadmap; or working out which bits of a feature to prioritise, or who to hire and how to structure a team; whatever process you follow or however ‘empowered’ you feel: it’s the quality of the decisions you make that ultimately dictate success.
In 2016 Jeff Bezos dedicated a whole chunk of his letter to shareholders to ‘High Velocity Decision Making’. What he said (about one and two-way door decision, see below) was fascinating and has become business-lore, but just as fascinating is the fact he included it in the first place. How his company made decisions is such a part of the DNA, and he believed, a part of their future success that he felt the need to talk about it in his annual letter.
But how do you make good decisions quickly? If only there was a simple answer. Some of it is the benefit of experience and intuition that you just pick up over time. But there’s more to it than that: method and mindset as well as inspiration. And it’s something I’ve been quietly obsessed with.
It’s a massive topic, but to keep it simple I’ve drawn up six rules. And I’ve based them on three things: 1) My own experience. 2) A number of different frameworks and tactics or rituals used by a variety of companies and 3) I’ve looked at a batch of pieces from the Harvard Business Review on how people make bad decisions; seen the consistent trends in them, and then flipped those so they are positive. There are links to all of the resource at the bottom.
Be clear about what you have to decide, and when (and stick to it)
This sounds spectacularly obvious, but especially in larger organisations or those who are prone to debate and discussion, it’s remarkable how quickly decisions can snowball into things which are much bigger than they need to be (’Let’s not tie two oil tankers together,’ a colleague of mine used to say as we would start to do exactly that).
Deadlines either need to be tight enough to force an outcome as quickly as reasonable (or perhaps a bit quicker) and unblock work. Or you can agree that ‘we don’t need to decide this yet’ - and so cut short discussion and debate about something that it will be much simpler to discuss when a set of other things have already happened.
Involve the right people at the right time in the right way
Perhaps the most important rule of all. And this is where you can get into all sorts of acronyms to decide a process of taking a decision through an organisation. I like S.P.A.D.E from Gokul Rajaram (which is based on his time at Square and Facebook); and D.E.C.I.D.E - which has its roots in medical decision making. But all these have similar components.
Be clear about who needs to be involved and how: I’m a big fan of the DACI model: so you know who’s the Driver, who’s the Approver, who needs to be Consulted, and who needs to be informed. This sounds very corporate - and yes, it scaled nicely in a big organisation (where the real skill is in making your ‘consulted’ list as short but valuable as possible). But it’s worth it even as a 5-minute mental check-list even if it’s just you making a relatively simple decision yourself.
Who’s decision is it anyway? Do I need to get any approval for this? Who will I need to tell after I’ve made it? Even in a small organisation, someone has to have their name on the decision. In 37 Signals ReWork podcast about their decision making
“make it clear almost as you go into making this decision, who’s making the decision, whose call is this actually? Whose role is this? Whose hat does this belong under? And that the discussion is a way of primarily informing that person about all the trade offs and perspectives as you see them. But in accepting that, I mean, as it’s often said, great decisions don’t come out of committees…I think that really just sort of helps clear it because sometimes you can fall into like, Hey, there’s four people sitting around discussing this thing. Like we all have an equal vote or voice in this. No, we don’t. There’s someone who has the responsibility of making the call and moving forward and we shouldn’t dull ourselves into believing that this is actually a democratic thing.
Get the experts’ opinions early. The hard constraints about most product decisions are normally technical or legal and regulatory - they’re the priority on your consulted list. Make sure they’re heard and explored quickly. If you’re preparing everything for an exec to make a final decision, you need to think who’s counsel will they seek, make sure that you’ve captured that early (and ideally get them into the final meeting or comms with the exec).
Listen - really listen - to disagreement and diverse views: The second priority on your consulted list are those who you sense will disagree with whatever you’re proposing. You might think you know the answer. You might think it’s a shoo-in. And when you hear someone disagreeing with you you, you just assume they’re dumb, being petty, or just blocking you for the sake of it. Don’t. Do the meeting (and always a meeting never an angry email chain). Listen, really listen and understand where they’re coming from. It will need to inform both your solution and how you communicate it. If you try and steamroller over dissent, it always comes back to bite you (and yes, that is the voice of experience!).
The other thing to think about here is meeting dynamics - and ensuring that once you’ve invited people into the room (real or vitual) you encourage a full range of diverse opinions to be expressed and you avoid Groupthink. I’m a big fan of using blind voting, or similar mechanics to allow this. Two examples.
At Amazon: when hiring, everyone who is on the hiring loops blind votes on whether they are inclined or disinclined to hire using an online tool - before any discussion of the candidate. It’s ok to change your mind after the discussion.
At Coda: they have two ‘rituals’ called Dory and Pulse both use Coda docs (but you could use Forms or Excel or a Google doc) to make sure people can say what they’re thinking and make sure the right questions get asked.
Finally - a good decision can turn into a bad one if it’s not communicated clearly and loudly to all those who are relevant. And this includes a bit of sensitivity about how the news will go down to various people. If you know this is going to go down badly with someone - don’t just have them as the 25th cc on an email - get on a call and explain. Exactly how you would like to be treated.
Have some higher level guiding principles
Some decisions are difficult because you’re being asked to choose between two options that both of equals amounts of pros and cons. The missing bit here is some kind of framework that transcends this particular decision and is relevant within your organisation in order to help you.
How big a decision is this anyway?: Here’s where the Amazon One-way/ Two-way door framework comes in. If a decision is irreversible - a one way door - it needs careful consideration and to go up the chain of command to present the evidence as clearly and effectively as possible to the Approver. But if it’s reversible - a two way door decision - make it quickly and move on. The standard way to close a two day door decision is: : ‘OK, I can see we’re not going to agree on this, but this is a reversible decision - so let’s make a call and agree how we’ll measure it, and if we’ve got it wrong, we’ll change it’.
In a similar vein, Brandon Chu of Shopify has a great framework for assessing the importance of a decision and how you should approach it as a result in this article.
Allignment with a strategic priority: The whole point of a strategy is to help you make decisions about what to do and what not to do. If you’re having to choose between two equally attractive; equally expensive features - the question is always which will push your strategy forward most effectively. If the answer is you don’t have a strategy - it might be an idea to fix that before you start making a load of decisions.
Ask the bigger question: Shihir Mehrotra at Coda has the concept of an Eigen question - which basically means framing the question at a higher level, that gets closer to the root of the problem - and in doing so will help solve future questions as well. His specific example was from the early days of YouTube deciding whether they should link out to video that they knew customers wanted, but weren’t on their service. (the specific example was Modern Family, which ABC was keeping on its own site. They decided it wasn’t a matter of looking at the pros and cons of this specific question, but instead asking whether consistency of experience was better than comprehensiveness. They chose Consistency. And that’s why YouTube to this day doesn’t link out to content on other platforms. The point is - where there isn’t a higher level framework - create one, and then go back and solve your problem.
Be in the right state - physically and emotionally
When you read about how bad decisions get made a lot of it comes down to people simply being in the wrong state to make a good decision.
There’s an obvious side to this, which is that you won’t make good decisions if you’re exhausted, if you’re pissed off about something either at home or work, if you’ve just come out of a bad meeting. Be aware if that’s you. This is exactly when a short delay might lead to a better outcome. Go ahead and discuss everything- but then sleep on it and decide in the morning.
You don’t make great decisions when you feeling threatened or pressured. My constant refrain to teams is: ‘No-one makes a great decision with a gun to their head…so first - find a way to take the gun from your head’. An standard example of this: We’re being asked to choose between two sub-optimal options to do something because there’s a deadline set by some regulatory body. Which do you choose? The answer of course is neither - you go and do everything possible to get that deadline moved - and then look at what your options are.
But there’s also the need to make sure you’re in the right mindset. For example, if you’ve just spent 4 hours sitting with finance grinding through different ways to keep costs under control, you’re probably not in the right frame of mind to suddenly assess a number of big ambitious strategic options.
Consider the options as cooly and neutrally as possible.
This really is worth a book not a few paragraphs. So yes, the first thing is there have to be options. If you’re presenting up - it’s ok to give a recommendation for a decision, but also show what you’re recommending it against, and why. If you’re working with a team - make sure you’ve kicked the tyres on a number of options and assessed them rather than just chosen a solution and spent your time trying to convince yourself its right.
If you’re presenting the options you need to make sure you go through a cycle of divergent thinking followed by convergent thinking (The bible for me on this is a book caled The Thinker’s Toolkit if you want to know more). In other words - initially spitting out a large range of different options; and then whittling them down to a shorter list.
When I looked at all the reasons people made bad decisions here there were a load of traits: Being over political; Going on first impressions rather than looking at the evidence; Overconfidence; and you can then add to that all of the different biases that you learn if you read any book on Decision Science. The truth is - as human beings we have all sorts of flaws when it comes to weighing up options.
It helps to have a few hacks/ standard questions to see
Which solution will look best in a year’s / three year’s time? This is another way to ‘take the gun away from your head’ - step back and get this in context. That three week delay that seems so painful now will be irrelevant then. Then again, that corner you’re about to cut is going to come back and bite you time and time again.
How will it feel when you have to explain this to…. ? You can either add in the name of your CEO or the media. At Amazon when deciding whether we should deprecate a number of older platforms we actually anticipated a customer complaint going to Jeff, and as part of our doc on the recommendation we crafted our explanation to him about why we felt it was acceptable to do this.
How would (person one level up from me) see this? A good one (and a good tactic generally) when the decision is yours. Think like your boss. Or your boss’s boss. They are going to be less swayed by some of the smaller factors that are causing churn. This of course, assumes you have a pretty competent boss. If not, well, that’s a slightly bigger issue..
Make a decision. Not a compromise.
Analysis paralysis. Indecisiveness. Waiting for that last bit of data. Or that one other person’s opinion. There is always a reason to delay. But remember where we started. We were clear about what we needed to decide and when we needed to do it. And that still sticks.
You will never have all the data. You will never have captured all of the information. But if you’ve ticked the boxes above you’re going to be in a pretty good place.
Here’s the hard bit though. You have to push for the right call - not necessarily the most popular call; and you don’t want to come up with some sub optimal fudge in order to keep everyone internally happy. (Another Bezos-ism: Truth seeking > Social Cohesion).
And you’re done!
Now, really - how hard was that? The truth is that with most decisions, the most important part is that they’re made and the organisation moves on. If it doesn’t go your way - get over it. If you expressed your opinion with clarity and conviction, and they decided to go the other way - that’s all part of the process.
RESOURCES
ReWork Podcast: Making the call is making progress
Coda: How Dory and Pulse equalise voices and remove groupthink in meetings
Jeff Bezos: 2016 letter to shareholders about High Velocity Decision making
Brandon Chu: Making good decisions as a product manager.
Nick Dimitrov: Social Cohesion vs Truth Seeking
Ness Labs: Why smart people make dumb choices -
Psychology Today: 5 Common causes of bad decisions
Forbes: 6 Reasons Why Leaders make bad decisions
HBR: 9 Habits That Lead to Terrible Decisions
All of these can be found at https://TheBestProductStuff.com