Empower your team by making ‘logically invested’ decisions
If you work in a Product Management/Consulting team, you may be familiar with the below situation:
- A team member is constantly bringing up a previously vetoed idea (like animated in-app notifications) with every iteration of the app version..
- You begin to think, “what motivates the individual to bring up the same thing again and again..?”
When individuals are doggedly persistent about an idea, they can either be Logically or Emotionally invested. In this article, I explore the following:
Meaning of this distinction
Implications with respect to Product Management
How cognizance of the distinction empowers teams to take better decisions.
What does it mean?
Logically Invested in an Idea — Agnostic of whose brainchild an idea is, it is evaluated with respect to a set of established constraints in an unbiased manner.
Eg: Team ABC — while working on a restaurant finder app like Zomato, is contemplating building a Payments Module
Let’s make a list of Constraints for ABC
- Payments is not a core competency
- Time to market — gotta hit the market fast!
- Dearth of resources to work on that module
- Opportunity Cost
- Trust issues — will the target segment trust ABC with a sensitive module like Payments which is not its core competency?
In light of these constraints, one of the team members suggests your company should partner with XYZ simply because
- Payments is XYZ’s core competency
- Can roll out the feature soon after integrating their SDK
- Ample documentation available, which makes integration easy. Not many resources required
- Good consumer experience because XYZ platform is tried and tested
- Team can invest time in building something else which can help them differentiate their offering in the market
- Consumers are familiar with the secure XYZ platform and there would be less churn
Assuming this hits all the right spots in terms of long term Vision, Strategy, and Core Competencies, you’d agree and say “let’s roll with it.”
Emotionally Invested in an Idea — Being biased in evaluating an idea and (not giving a rat’s ass about the constraints) as the originator is you or someone you know very well. In other words, being personally attached to an idea simply because you thought of it.
Eg: Aided by a moment of brilliance, you design a tedious user on-boarding flow for a consumer knowledge platform app like Quora
- Step 1: Registration
- Step 2: User provides permission to receive push notification
- Step 3: User provides permission for storage & location
- Step 4: Setup User Profile
- Step 5: Setup Preferences
- Step 6: Setup Email Alerts for searches
You may argue that by asking users to register, you’re getting sign ups and you can track to let your team know of that metric. Knowing sign ups without knowing daily/monthly active users or identifying your core users is meaningless.
Somebody suggests,
“Since its a consumer app and a tedious on-boarding flow has users dropping at key touch points, why don’t we demonstrate value by showing content (like a sneak peek)and nudging the user to register to ask/answer a question?”
Acknowledging Enterprise/Consumer app distinction & understanding consumer app world is unforgiving in terms of customer churn, and considerable amount of bad reviews can halt your AppStore/PlayStore ascension, if you say “hey why don’t we go with my idea” … well, what do I tell you — you’re being irrational and emotionally invested in your idea.
How does it relate to PM practice?
Product Managers collaborate with a gamut of departments like Sales & Marketing, Customer Success, UI/UX Designers, Dev, and QA. There will be discussions related to Feature Design, UI/UX Design, API design with tech team, product marketing material with marketing n so on…
At times, there could arise points of creative friction on how to design a feature, present a good user experience, or on-board users. It is imperative that PM understands that he/she is the voice of reason. PM, through cogent arguments should sound and act like he/she is logically invested irrespective of who pitched the idea.
By doing so,
- It helps the team stay focused on the pressing issue(s)
- Meetings do not have meaningless discussions
- Meeting(s) is/are brought to a sound conclusion
- Impact of the decision taken on other plans of the team is conveyed & next steps are determined
- PM concludes by reiterating the key takeaways from the meeting(s)
What works in the long term?
Customer Empathy
Exhibiting customer empathy through design does not mean being emotionally invested. On the contrary, defining end users’ pain points & understanding the objectives of a feature before hand enables the team to be logically invested.
Data-informed decision making
Base decisions on insights from market research, user interviews, and usability tests. Have data by your side. When there is no data available (read entirely new product), invest in the power of intuition but learn quickly from feedback the target segment provides.
Cognizance of Ground Realities
Being logically invested does not mean PM has to be oblivious to ground realities. Understand the constraints your team has (i.e resources, time, or budget) and plan accordingly. Have alternatives whether it’s a release readiness plan, sprint plan, or a 6 month product roadmap. Planning is 95% work done.
Emotional Detachment
Ultimately, a PM’s quiver is incomplete without being able to emotionally detach or get influenced by the originator of an idea and focus on validating an idea or a hypothesis
Being irrational and emotionally attached to a feature because it was his/her idea, or thinking logically about a feature design — we’ve all been there and done that.
As a budding PM, one should learn over a series of team experiences (whether it is brainstorming a marketing effort or product feature design, or coming up with a release readiness plan) that it is essential to uphold the tenet of a good PM — being the voice of reason. It behooves the PM to distinguish if team is being emotionally or logically invested which helps streamline future conversations.
As a result, you detach yourself from the notion that ‘you’ came up with an idea for a ‘hack’, ‘workaround’, or a ‘feature.’ Acknowledging the difference between being logically and emotionally invested and upholding the former will empower you to take better decisions for your team.
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