Product Management is about taking decisions
I believe in 3 mantras for effective Product Management:
- Making the list
- Prioritise the list
- Do the list
All these series of actions leads me efficiently to ship the product. This is an opportunity to communicate to users about the new released version. Every iteration is an output of many actions that the team takes to serve the user. And this is output of decisions that respective stakeholders have made before.
The journey begins from:
- Market feedback
- User research
- Product Analytics
- Product roadmap
- EPIC creation
- Sprint planning
- Creating quality user story
- Reach to a common consent for Acceptance Criteria
- Passing through complete Engineering practices
- Release planning
- Release
- Post release — Measuring matrix
- Set it in Product roadmap as per priority
- Set-up the product support framework
- And the journey continuous …
Across this timeline, only one factor that leads and inspires for execution is taking decisions.
Decision leads the team to take actions. To release any product or iterative version of the product, generally it goes to many or all points mentioned above. And it is all about taking decisions, decisions and decisions.
It is always important that taking decisions is for better than delaying to take decisions. Forget about the right or wrong decisions to take, as even wrong decisions gives you and the company a learning experience. Eventually this process makes a value driven organisation to build the product that users love to use with long-term engagement.
To act or not is a decision also choosing what to act upon is decision to take. Taking decisions is also about effective team building. How an individual or a team or an organisation takes a decision depends on the how carefully they have answered one question of WHY. As the answer to the why plays critical role to take or not to take the decision.
Summary
Taking decision is first step towards output. The output may be good or bad, expected or unexpected — whatever it may be to be there you need to take decision.
Share your experience that how taking decision has helped/ empowered you to know the real user problem better and to solve it effectively.