Product is Culture

Decision making is always influenced by the emotion of regret and the element of risk. We are biochemical algorithms that tend to select the option that we will regret the least trying to minimise the amount of regret we will have.
This is the simple reason why top-down decision making doesn’t work in complex and fast changing systems as technology companies.

The best you can do is:

• Devolve the decision making away from the management team to the people closest to the customers (someone calls this holacracy or weak product ownership)
• Empower everyone to influence the customer experience
• Build a culture that influences product decisions in the right direction
• Built fully autonomous teams with clear KPIs
• Enable who is closer to customer to take decisions and learn via feedback loop
• Hire the best people because the experience your customers have is a direct outcome of the decisions they make