Scaling your decision-making process
As product managers, we make 10’s of decisions daily. Our long term success depends on the success rate of these decisions. Not all decisions turn out to be right. But over a period of time, we look back at our previous decisions, find patterns, build intuitions, find better ways of applying our learnings and improve our success rate of decision making. What we are doing is building a playbook. Some have it documented while some don’t , but nevertheless, every successful product manager has a playbook for decision making.
Over a period of time, some of us become managers and start managing a team of PMs. A rookie mistake that a lot of first-time managers make, is to continue making decisions on behalf of your direct reports. As we gradually realize - this leads to multiple issues :
You become the bottleneck, the team waits for you to make all decisions and the team slows down
You have a team of individuals who are not motivated and driven - because they are just executing your decisions
Your quality of decision making keeps degrading - there is no way you can have in-depth context about everything to keep on making consistently high-quality decisions.
You are always busy and in and out of meetings all day long. You don’t remember when was the last time you were not in a meeting while having lunch.
You wonder, how can I correct this? How do I push decision making down and not get involved in everything? Welcome my friend, you have reached the first stage of making progress. Identifying the problem itself.
What to do when faced with this situation ?
Zero ambiguity : Aim for zero ambiguity. Please note zero ambiguity does not mean you have answers for everything. It just means that the team knows what you know and what you don’t know. The team is crystal clear on what you are trying to communicate.
Tip : Overcommunicate , ask for acknowledgement and confirm if the message has landed or not.
Key indicators : Your team members talk the exact same language as you, even in forums where you are not present. (slack groups, team meetings etc)
Set up for success : I frequently ask my direct reports the following questions :
Are you clear what your goals are ?
Are you receiving all ther support required to achieve those goals ?
Do you have any blockers ?
These may seem like very simple questions , but if the answer is yes to 1 & 2 and no for 3 - then you have set up your direct report for success. Now your job is to get out of their way.
Communicate the “how” along with the “what” : No matter what you do, there will be times (especially during the initial days) , when you will have to make a lot of decisions. Take your team along in this journey. Talk to them about the various data points you considered , about that political landmine that only you know how to avoid , how you connected the various dots across different sub teams , how you think the message ought to be delivered , which principle you used, what are the typical guidelines you use during such a situation etc. If you think this will slow you down - you are right .But think of this as an investment for a brighter future. After enough repetition you will find that your team members start taking decisions which aligns with your way of working. Initially they will come to you for validation , after multiple successful attempts they will themselves start taking these decisions on the ground.
Fine tune your alert mechanisms : Once your team starts taking decisions independently it is possible that at times they will encounter situations which is not part of their decision making framework yet. Team members with high agency will still go ahead and make the decision nevertheless - which invariably will be an sub-optimal decision. Accept the fact that this is okay to happen. The worst thing you could do is to take it up with the team member for not consulting with you. Doing this will confuse them. Remember, you were the one who led them down this path of independent decision making. What you need to do in this situation is to teach them again how they could handle similar situation in future and lay down your decision making process for this respective situation. Allowing the sub-optimal decision making to happen can at times be expensive. To that end you need to ensure that your alert mechanisms are in place. These can be email chains , slack conversations , passing comments from outside stakeholders , esclations etc. Once you have receive these signals you may decide to intervene proactively. If you decide to intervene let the team member know why you did it and what you were trying to avoid. Help them close the situation and move out to earlier hands-off mode again. Over a period of time , your team will know that your intervention is a signal for them that their decision making process needs fine tuning. This serves as a good feedback loop.
What I mentioned above are principles. Exact implementation will vary based on your management style and team situation. Please feel free to customise accordingly.
Hope this helps !