Product Management
Developing Product Instinct
How product managers learn to make effective decisions
Product management is all about decision-making. You will often hear core competencies of product management centered around things like communication skills, taking a user-driven approach, or building a roadmap. But ultimately, a day in the life of a product manager really comes down to decisions. A lot of decisions. How should I make use of my time? How should I prioritize these customer needs? How should I solicit buy-in for my vision?
Much has been made about decision-making recently. And rightly so; it is an underappreciated skill. Zat Rana wrote a piece that talks in part about how decisions are made at Amazon. As with others who have tackled the Amazon approach, decisions are broken down into high and low impact decisions. Or, put another way, reversible and irreversible decisions. The major thesis behind Amazon’s approach to decision-making is to optimize toward the number of reversible decisions being made. These decisions should be made more quickly and more often than irreversible decisions.
This led me to think about how product managers make decisions. We are trained to seek data and justification for things that we do. But at a certain point, the amount of planning and research that goes into being a product manager becomes a case of paralysis by analysis. Most of the decisions being made at a product owner level are not irreversible decisions. As one of my former bosses once told me, “we’re not performing brain surgery here, no one is going to die if we make mistakes.” I refer back to that piece of advice often, as there is a tendency for product managers to fear failure.
Certainly, there will be cases where some due diligence and thinking can make a decision much easier to make. In these cases, having the experience to know how a decision can be narrowed to the best alternative will aid a product manager. But in other cases, when faced with an idea that is risky or perhaps even likely to fail, making a quick decision — right or wrong — can at least save the time spent agonizing over something for which no good answer exists. The skill in this is simply knowing which decisions will benefit from further thought and which ones add the most value in the time they save.
Once a product manager has had some practice with this decision-making shorthand, they begin to develop — or perhaps reveal — their product instinct. Product instinct is what I would describe to be a very difficult-to-teach skill; it essentially enables a product manager to make quick, low-risk high-reward decisions without needing to always move through all steps of the decision-making process. This powerful mechanism allows experienced product people to move faster than seems otherwise possible. It is a great equalizer in balancing the laundry-list of product management tasks.
As with many things in product management, effective decision-making is a skill that can only be mastered with repetition. At first, deciding on a course of action, or even the next task to tackle, requires a fair amount of reflection. After encountering similar patterns of decisions over time, the decision-making reflexes become faster. Eventually, the product instinct develops into an almost second nature habit of making rapid decisions. If practiced properly, the decision-making skill will become ingrained in the daily life of a product manager.
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