Product Management Checks & Balances
A Democratic Approach to Product Management Decision Making
For many product managers and marketers, Data is King in the new world order. My thinking—if Data is really King then the new world is actually no different than the old world. You’re still operating in monarchies, patriarchies, and what have you. A system of checks and balances is what propels you into the new world. At least that’s what their teaching in United States history classes. What follows is a brief primer and an analogy of how I use a system of checks and balances to effectively make product management decisions.
To best understand the analogy here is a quick refresher on the three branches of government and their roles here in the United States. The executive branch sets the cultural tone, strategic objectives, and direction of policy-making that the nation will follow during the president’s tenure. They enforce laws, but they don’t get to make any without the legislative branch. The legislative branch operates as the representatives of regional interest throughout the nation and works to implement laws on their behalf. They can’t enforce the laws themselves though. Then there is the judiciary branch which determines the constitutionality of the laws the other two branches put into place.
What does any of this have to do with product management?
As a product manager I largely use three methods of decision making:
- Strategy-driven decision-making is when you are making product decisions based on your organization’s strategic objectives.
- Data-driven decision-making is when you are making product decisions based on quantifiable metrics.
- Intuition-driven decision making is when you are making product decisions based on what you as a human know and understand about other human beings and their behaviors.
In my 10+ years working in product management, I have seen a wide breadth of PMs that typically default into one of the above patterns in decision making. Having any one of these as your default decision-making pattern lends itself to problems with your products and services because as is with all things in life… too much of one thing is never a good thing.
For instance, if I only use strategy to make my decisions I’ll build something the executives want, but there are no guarantees any customers will buy it. If I were to exclusively focus on data, the new reigning king of decision making, I’ll build something that addresses customers most frequently requested features, but completely misses the mark on solving the overarching problems customers are actually facing. If I were to focus solely on intuition-driven I would end up building a product for myself.
This is why I use these three decision-making methodologies as a system of governance in my product management decision-making process. I leverage the strengths of each one to account for the weaknesses of the others, and I use all three in almost all decisions that I make. In the analogy of the US government, I would liken Strategy-Driven to the Executive Branch, Data-Driven to the legislative branch, and Intuition-Driven to the Judicial Branch.
The Executive Branch
Strategy—It’s what products crave. When you are designing and building products you are always going to have to make trade-offs. Strategic objectives are the thing that tells you which trade-offs are acceptable and which trade-offs are not. Without your executive branch holding your product decision-making process accountable to higher order objectives, you are highly likely to land yourself in a place where you can’t solve the biggest customer problems.
Here is a real-world example of this pitfall in action at my current organization, a social media management SaaS. In the early days of our publishing suite, there was not a strategic objective that customers should be able to analyze and communicate about a social media post throughout its entire lifecycle, from conception through distribution and reporting. Had that been the strategic objective they would have built a singular post management system that handles all phases of the post lifecycle. Instead, they built 5 different post management systems for each phase of a posts lifecycle. None of these systems shared contextual data with each other. So we’ve had to rebuild all of these systems as a singular system over the last year just to be able to deliver something as simple as an audit trail of comments and editing activity. This has ultimately stalled our squad's ability to deliver customer value in even more meaningful ways.
The Legislative Branch
Data—It’s the will of the people. Regardless of how you think the US House and Senate are currently operating, they were designed to be a collection of data points that represent the wants and needs of the customers of the US government. They gut check the executive branch when the strategy is way off base, and they optimize a strategy when it is aligned with the needs of the electorate. That is how I opt to use data in product management. I vet strategic objectives and optimize the tactics that we’ll execute to meet them.
Since this article starts out with the assumption that you all understand the importance of data I won’t bore you with a real-world example of what can happen when you don’t feel the need to use data in your decision-making. Feel free to let me know in the comments if you think otherwise.
The Judicial Branch
Intuition—It’s the X-factor. Sometimes your strategy and data decision-making process will lead you to a decision that is simply unconstitutional. What I mean by unconstitutional is:
- Does it align with my core values as a citizen of humanity?
- Does it align with my organization’s values and principles?
- Does it align with the values and beliefs of our customers?
If the answer to any of these questions is “No”, then the decision was unconstitutional. It is the responsibility of the judiciary to overturn unconstitutional decisions. This means for a product decision that your data and strategy told you was a go, is actually a no-go. It also means that you will decide to do some things because they are the constitutionally correct thing to do despite your data and strategy telling you otherwise. This can be a hard decision to make. I for one look at it as an opportunity to rethink the strategy and assess if I am actually measuring the correct things, because if I am actually measuring the thing that really matters then how I could have landed on an unconstitutional product decision.
A real-world example of this would be Instagram. I was watching Kevin Systrom in an interview for Wired 25. In the interview, he talked about how they ended up introducing anti-bullying features like being able to turn off comments even though it went against their core strategic objective, engagement, and was likely to decrease a core unit of measurement, comments. They shipped the features anyway because they were the constitutionally correct things to do. Over time they actually began to see an increase in growth and engagement because people felt freer to communicate on a platform that would help protect them from the bullies of the world.
I’ll sum up this article the same way all my favorite self-help books close out each chapter, with bullet points that quickly say what I just took 5 minutes to tell you:
- Use strategy to ensure your decisions are keeping you on the right path
- Use data to inform your decisions and optimize your tactical execution
- Use intuition to ensure you are building a product with a positive impact
Please clap if you enjoyed reading this article. I’m always interested to hear how other individuals go about making their product decisions on a daily basis. Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with me.
Thank you,
Christopher Korokeyi
