Making Product Decisions

A popular, profitable product is nothing but a series of product decisions made right. We, product managers, all know, at the end of the day, the roadmaps, backlogs and estimations doesn't count at all. We have to build something that people love and ready to pay for. And we have to get there first, otherwise someone else will. So the most important part is to make a few critical product decisions fast. If you can do it you can give a new momentum to your not-so-shiny product, get better numbers, and become a hero in your team. What do you need to make those decisions?

Options, but not "first ideas"

You can't make a decision if you don't know what your options are. That's obvious. But most people don't take ideation and brainstorming really seriously. And many product people think of themselves as kind of a weird Steve Jobs, who can find out the best solutions alone. Besides the fact that it ruins your team morale, the sad truth is in most cases your first ideas are not the best possible solutions. So a wise product manager gives space to the team to ideate. Sometimes you even have to push them a little bit to do it. Designers are usually the creative types. It's their profession to ideate, so they know how to do it well, and how to involve other people too. A good design team can help a lot in finding possible solutions to your problems. It's very easy when someone maps the solution space for you and you just have to choose the best direction.

First sketches of a new product

Fresh customer insights instead of opinions

Many self-confident "leaders" in the same room, fighting endlessly about a topic. Familiar situation? Surprisingly, asking more smart people doesn't always help you to make better decisions. What helps is more and better customer insights. You have to be the one in the room, who knows your customers the best. You have to know their pains, struggles and successes. Their problems and goals. You even have to know them better than they know themselves. At least according to your domain. To achieve that you will need to get fresh costumer insights frequently. Of course you can say that it's very time consuming, and it is true. You have to do interviews, user tests, field research, etc. At UX studio, when we work together with product teams we don't just delegate designers, but a UX researcher too. Imagine to have someone in your team, who brings fresh customer insights to you every single week. Yes, it is as liberating as it sounds. These insights can help you to cut the debate short, and make better decisions within a short timeframe.

Field research at an airport

Numbers, but most importantly, better questions

Data-driven company, right? In our digital world we have the luxury of making decisions based on hard facts. Or do we? Most people underestimate the effort needed to get useful data. The best companies have dedicated data teams. If you don't have one you can still appoint someone from your developers to help you in answering the questions based on real data. You will also need someone who can ask the right questions. When we design apps we usually ask a lot of questions like "How many users tried this function within the first week?" Many times we just can't get answers from the technology side. In a nutshell: have someone who can ask the right questions and someone who can mine the data and come up with an answer.

Participation: the most important factor of speed

Things can be really slow when someone who has to be involved doesn't available to be there. The best is when everybody is in the room when it comes to making decisions. We work in week-long design sprints at UX studio, and we learned early that we need every party to be represented on our weekly design meetings.

So we invite a business leader (probably you?) and someone from the developers to attend. Our designer can present the ideas we came up with, our researcher can present the user insights and with the business and development side together we can make decisions on the spot.

What if some top managers have to be involved too in a large organization? My best advice is to identify the most important decision points, and start to organize a meeting 2-3 weeks before those. You need some experience to know when those points will come, but it's not impossible. We usually have a short week-by-week plan for the coming 1-2 months, so we know when we will need others to participate.

Facilitating a persona workshop at HBO

Common ground, to help others make product decisions without you

Sometimes you don't even have to be involved in decision making. If everyone is on the same page, your teammates can make decisions without you. How can you trust your developers and other people to know everything about your business and make the right decisions all the time? If sometimes they take part in brainstorming sessions and workshops they will know the basic things and won't come to you with everything. For example when we start working with a new team we usually do a persona workshop together to clarify who we are building the app for and what their goals, problems and motivations are.

So you need these 5 things to make better product decisions faster. Have someone to find possible solutions, listen to customer insights when you choose from them, dive into the numbers when it is needed, invite everyone to build a common ground and be there in the important moments.

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