How to make difficult product decisions with more clarity?

One of the key skills any product person (or leader) has to master is making decisions. There is likely not going to be a single day in the life of a product person where we’re not asked to make at least 30-50 decisions. They could be simple things like reviewing the request pipeline from the support team, triaging bugs, choosing a design template, sorting your roadmap items, selecting stories for your upcoming sprint. Or they could be more difficult decisions to make: what strategic goal to focus on in the upcoming OKR cycle, how to pick between two promising larger projects with seemingly equal value and complexity to build, choosing a direction out of discovery insights, or whether an already released product feature is in compliance with ethical considerations or legal requirements.

We will have to make a lot of decisions and we’re usually aiming to make them with good balance: We can neither afford to make decisions too fast or ill informed, nor is it wise to avoid them based on a desire for more perfect information. Decisions based on our own bias or preferences (or the opinions of few loud voices) are not likely going to be smart. Decisions made without good enough data or without any guiding principles will likely be poor as well. But too much research and endless discussions can paralyze a team. While some decisions are relatively easy to make (like bug priorities), a lot of product decisions are surprisingly hard to make. Especially if you have a desire to make “right” choices or “good” decisions. The question is always: How can you tell what “right” or “good” is? What is your ultimate goal? How do you act when there is imperfect information, or a high degree of complexity and an obvious answer is not easy to discern. How can you take the stress out of making important decisions and tap into your most creative, powerful and intelligent self in those moments?

Making decisions in uncertainty

There are many techniques for how to make decisions even when you have a high degree of uncertainty. This is where experiments and testing become super helpful. They take the guessing out of making decisions and let you learn from committing to one (or multiple) course(s) of action for the duration of an experiment or testing cycle. At the end of an A/B Test (given you have enough statistically relevant data), you often have a clear winner on a decision for a Call To Action Wording or the color or placement of a button. If your team decided on experimenting with sprint durations, you can quickly learn the pros and cons of working in weekly, biweekly or three week cycles. Experimenting is a great strategy when the consequences of a choice can be observed fast, and when the ethical and human implications of the choice are not likely going to be severe.

Complex strategic or ethical choices

Some decisions are more complex than something you can easily experiment on in a short learning cycle. This is typically true when deciding on a vision, defining impact or strategic direction, weighing ethical considerations, or a when we’re making choices with consequences for the humans on our team. You can’t easily unfire a person or do a biweekly re-organization of your product teams. You can’t keep changing your vision for the impact you want to create every week (and keep trust levels in the team high). You may make decisions for a course of action or a product that impacts the mental or physical health of the people on your team or your users. You might build cutting edge new solutions with AI components that have ethical considerations that are not easy to oversee in a quick 30 minute prioritization meeting. Or you may get to choose between two kinds of options for your personal career (e.g. working as an individual contributor or taking a role to lead other product managers). These kind of decisions can make us feel like being between a rock and a hard place.

High uncertainty, complex & important decisions

I’m intrigued with what might help us make good choices and stack our chances of choosing wisely in highly uncertain, complex AND important decisions. The ones you want to invest some time making well (or at least as good as you can with what you and your team knows at that time).

When I look at my coaching training, there are tools in fulfillment coaching, balance coaching and process coaching that can be great friends in those scenarios:

• Clarity on vision, strategy and goals (helps us understand whether the decision is likely creating the impact or outcome we aim for)
• Clarity on values (helps us understand the ethical aspects, boundaries and stretches we may want to consider as part of an important decision. Helps us understand if a choice is keeping us in integrity with our own values. Choosing things that violate our values has a high cost in energy and motivation and can be a route to burnout or churn in the team.)
• An ability to discern a “full body yes” (helps us understand to utilize our wise intuitive intelligence as well as the emotional and body intelligence we all have. We can build a “voice and image” of this intelligence for ourselves that we can lean on when having to make an important decision)
• Ability to be with and discern emotion (helps us identify what limiting beliefs and potentially outdated reactive habits might stand in our way of choosing something new, powerful and exciting. Clarity on those saboteur patterns help us discern fast, when we’re acting from fear, rather than from a place of creativity or positive challenge)
• Ability to engage with perspectives and scenarios (helps us look at a decision from multiple viewpoints and come to smarter, better informed choices. This works particularly well when including a diverse set of perspectives from the team in important strategic decisions. They will as a collective simply see and know more)
• An appreciation for balance (helps us think in ranges, consider paradox and out of the box perspectives.. This might e.g. help us find that sweetspot between data driven decision making and human centric decision making.)
• Normalizing the emotional impact of high stake decisions (being clear on how the uncertainty, weight and stress these decisions can create for us, impact our creative and intellectual capacities, and having practices to address that consciously)

All the above-mentioned techniques and tools can be learnt, can be practiced in coaching and can be brought into how we make important decisions for ourselves as well as our teams. They require a bit of upfront work and then make all subsequent decisions easier, smarter and less stressful to be with. By taking the stress out of making important choices, you get access to your most creative, powerful and joyful self, in life and as a leader in your product team. A skillset that is crucial to healthy high performing teams.

Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

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If you would like to explore this more: reach out for a free discovery session with me.
I coach, speak, do workshops and blog about #leadership, #product leadership, #innovation, the #importance of creating a culture of belonging and how to succeed with your #hybrid or #remote teams.

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