Decisions, Decisions, Part 1: Four Principles for Making Faster, Better Decisions

Liviu Lica is a senior product manager at Hootsuite. In the first article in this 2-part series, Liviu shares the frameworks and principles that help him make more effective decisions in managing Hootsuite’s Analytics and Insights products.

Product management is one of those fuzzy, ill-defined roles that a couple of decades ago didn’t even have a name. One thing we know for sure that we need to do as product managers is to make decisions.

Here I’ll talk about six of the principles I use daily in decision making. They are clear, relatively simple to implement and work day after day.

A side note before we dive in: I believe that product managers take on too many decisions (or are expected to do so). My 2 cents’ worth is that this comes from product managers being described as the CEO of their product. A CEO is a decision maker; product managers, in my opinion, are more diplomats, representing our products and teams. We are facilitators, negotiators, and the people that make things run smoothly. Yes, we set the direction of our product, and we work on product strategy. But this is not the same as being the CEO. A discussion for another time.

Coming back to decisions, the principles I’ll share fall into two categories:

• Principles that help you make decisions faster, and
• Principles that make your decisions trustworthy — something your team can get behind.

In this article, we’ll look at the first category: principles that help you decide fast and move on.

1. Decisions are reversible

Most decisions are like a two-way-door: you can pass through, and if what’s on the other side is completely undesirable, you can come back.

Not all doors are two-way, of course, and any decision you make comes with a cost. Yet in most cases, if you make a decision and it happens to be the wrong one, the world will not collapse; people won’t get hurt and you will likely have just spent more time or money on something which was not that useful. There is an argument to be made that you learn more from mistakes than from successes (yet another topic of discussion). So even bad decisions might be good for something.

This idea of a two-way-door comes from a brilliant decision maker, Jeff Bezos. Like him or not, Bezos created a highly efficient culture, decision making being one of the skills at the core of it. Bezos’s letter to Amazon shareholders about high-velocity decisions is a good starting point for his philosophy on this.

What do you do when you have a decision that’s irreversible? Give it as much time as is reasonable and make sure not to get stuck. At some point you will have to make the call. Read on for more principles to guide you in making these types of decisions.

2. Create rules for routine decisions

In 3 Timeless Rules for Making Tough Decisions, Peter Bregman recommends we “use habits as a way to reduce routine decision fatigue.”

When I first read about this, I realized it was something I was doing unconsciously already as a result of the two-way-door principle. You surely know someone who agonizes over what food to choose on a menu. I used to do that myself. Or what to wear, or to take the car or the subway to work, and so on.

These are repetitive, predictable, everyday situations. You will go to a restaurant again; you will have to choose a pair of socks once more. For these situations, it helps to have simple rules, such as:

• Pick the first pair of socks you find in the drawer that match the occasion.
• Pick the first item from the menu that sounds good.
• If you have the option, choose the same locker at the gym every time.

3. Create if-then rules for unpredictable decisions

This principle is a variation on the previous one. Here’s an example to illustrate how it works. If you need to work on something and are interrupted too often to concentrate, make up a rule:

If I’m interrupted more than twice per hour when working on tasks that require concentration, I’ll go to a quiet room / ask colleagues for uninterrupted time / give up the work for the moment.

Just make a decision and stick with it and things will feel smoother. Consistency in following this rule is extremely valuable; it gives the people around you a chance to understand that you function in a certain way — and clarity in decision making and communication is one of the biggest assets of a product manager, as it generates a sense of confidence and reliability in you. Because decisions are two-way-doors — especially this kind — you can always choose to change the rule when it doesn’t fit you anymore.

4. Use timeboxing to manage uncertainty

Some decisions have too many possible outcomes — the inputs are not completely under your control or the outcomes are impossible to quantify properly. Think of decisions like: Should we invest in product A or product B, given that the result of the products depends on the evolution of the market and both look similarly attractive, based on the information we have? Or simpler: Should I invest in feature X or feature Y? Both were requested by a similar number of clients, both are in directions the company wants to invest in, but we just can’t do both.

The tendency here is to go into analysis paralysis, dragging the decision on and on, clawing for any bit of extra certainty. In these cases, Bezos talks about making decisions with 70% of the necessary information at hand “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

Bregman’s spin on this is that it helps to just say: “We need to make this decision by Monday.” Both of them argue that making a quick decision is more important than getting one more percent of certainty at the cost of a delay.

Many thinkers say similar things. The most famous quote is probably from Voltaire: “Better is the enemy of good.” Helmuth von Moltke’s “No plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy” has been much reinterpreted and was famously expressed by Mike Tyson as “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” The idea is the same: There is more uncertainty than you think, so just pick the best you can and move to the next challenge and course correct.

In the next article in this series, we’ll look at the quality of decisions.

Take a look at careers at Hootsuite: http://ow.ly/aSfO30oJwXp