The great polarity of decision-making
The target audience of this post are senior/mid career Product leaders aiming to establish a balance between autonomy for themselves & their teams, with the need to foster alignment / support from leaders & their orgs.
Afew months ago, my elder daughter (7) approached my wife & I with some consternation in her voice and mild frustration in her tone. It turned out she was fairly unhappy with our recent choices in weekend activities, and clearly felt she could do better — if only given the chance.
Upon deliberation, we collectively agreed to allow her to determine the plan for us for the coming weekend, entirely independently. As part of this newfound autonomy, she was to adhere to one simple condition — develop a plan that would feel fulfilling to all members of the family (including her 2 year old sister) by the end of the weekend.
A couple of hours later, she returned…exhausted and exasperated. “This is too hard! I don’t wanna do this anymore. Can you just make sure we have enough time for a play date for me?!?”
PM is, at its core, a decision-making discipline
Increasingly I see product management as a discipline where the fundamental ‘craft’ we try to master as judgement. At any given time, PMs are trying to nail decisions to address a series of non-obvious challenges —
How do you deliver value to your customers that is truly differentiated and sustainable?
How do you ensure the right product makes it in the hands of the right users at the right time?
How do you healthily monetize the value you’re creating for your customers in a way that’s meaningful to your organization, and earns you the right to continue to innovate again & again?
These types of questions get even more complex as you factor in varying time horizons, divergent needs of adjacent constituents for your product, ambiguity around feasibility, etc. Sometimes, you may have sufficient data & insights to help make these decisions obvious. More often though, you must make significant decisions in the absence of clear evidence and obvious choices.
It’s no surprise then that the quality of your product judgement is paramount in your ability to succeed as a PM. And why the topic of ‘decision-making’ is top of mind for those of us in the PM discipline to grow, develop and hone through our careers.
Fortunately there is no shortage of resources, materials and frameworks to help individuals (and PMs) make better decisions. In fact, one can argue that most training & courses designed for PMs at their core are designed to improve the practice and rituals of decision-making.
However in my experience, sadly, decision-making is often perceived as the biggest hurdle to overcome for many PMs — especially when it comes to decision-making in an organizational context. PMs often rate the topic of decision-making as a sore / ‘meh’ spot on employee satisfaction surveys. And you often come across decision fatigue as a challenge for PMs in larger organizations.
Why might this be happening?
Inherent tension in decisioning
Before we dig in further, it might be helpful to align upon a simple mental model for how we make decisions. Regardless of the context of a decision, we are faced with two limiting constraints: time & available information. Given these are both finite in nature, we are faced with a ‘meta’ choice first — how do we balance:
Decision speed i.e. faster decisions with less information at our disposal
Decision quality i.e. more informed decisions, but slower to get to
When it comes to resolving this tension, the most ideal scenario is that we are able to make very high quality decisions, very quickly. On the other hand, the worst case scenario is when we take a very long time and ultimately make a poor decision.
But in the messy reality that we live in, it’s far more common to find ourselves oscillating between the harder to reconcile ‘in between’ quadrants:
These tensions are especially tangible when decisions are being made in an organizational context. In organizations, access to more information (to improve decision quality) is often gained through including more people with specific expertise/perspective into the mix. They could be leaders, stakeholders, partners, peers, etc. However building new connections & investing in new relationships to gain access to said information can be incredibly time-intensive — so the tradeoffs are potentially quite significant.
Opposing forces in organizational decisions
Speaking with PMs about the challenges they face in terms of organizational decision-making, I often hear two categories of concerns being expressed.
On one hand, I hear many PMs complain about a lack of empowerment to make decisions efficiently, the need to spend countless hours getting to alignment/consensus with stakeholders & having to escalate strategies through multiple rounds of reviews to finally land. They feel they’re moving at snail’s pace, while having to manage expectations of many folks who are possibly quite distant from the customer problem.
On the other hand, I also hear from many PMs that they struggle with the lack of direction available to them in terms of company vision/strategy, absence of top-level guidance to inform hard tradeoff choices and inability to secure support/resourcing for their ‘obvious’ needs. They often lack conviction in the quality of their teams’ decisions or actions, since they are being done “in a vacuum”. And they feel strongly that they would be more successful if only they had more proactive leadership & clarity.
Do you see yourself in either of these camps? In fact, many of you might find themselves in both camps at the same time, depending on the situation you’re facing! If left unchecked and unsupported, both of these situations can lead to anxiety, stress and burnout. The struggle is real.
But I believe that these challenges are simply two sides to the same coin. Decision-making in an organizational context can be a struggle because the following two forces are pulling in opposite directions:
Individuals (ex: PMs, pods..) tend towards decision autonomy. This tendency typically correlates with the need for action & speed.
Collectives (ex: orgs, groups..) tend towards decision dependence. This tendency typically correlates with the need for cohesion & quality.
This tension is an example of a polarity — a system where opposing forces must necessarily act against each other to keep an overall dynamic in balance. Polarities like this need to be carefully managed, assessed and balanced out over time, continuously. In organizational decision-making, this polarity is what leads us to ping-pong between our competing desires to move freer & faster individually (speed), but also get input & buy-in from the collective (quality).
In the case of organizational decision-making, the polarity can be useful if managed well.
Decision autonomy enables bias to action for individuals and teams and is a huge unlock to advancing product.
Decision dependence enables organizations to collaborate effectively, connect dots to better identify/solve patterns, and help steer the ship in the same direction.
Managing decision-making polarity well requires a nuanced, “both/and” mindset. If done well, leaders are able to clearly identify when decisions are best addressed autonomously vs. collectively based on their nature. They can then build decision-making processes & cultures to imbibe that clarity across the organization. And if it plays out repeatedly over time, they can unlock the “Goldilocks Zone” of organizational decision-making: an ideal, intentional mix of “fast” and “high quality” decisions, executed throughout the org, with minimal overhead.
Managing the decision-making polarity
Sadly, many organizations have a tendency to misdiagnose decision-making challenges. To these organizations — and the leaders in them — decision-making challenges are perceived as problems they must “solve”. This approach lacks nuance and mis-frames the reality. For example: to them, their teams may simply be operating with too much need for consensus & risk averseness (i.e. not enough decision speed) or moving too quickly & haphazardly (i.e. not enough decision quality).
“Move fast, and break things”
As a Product leader, you will be much better served by being more nuanced & opinionated about how you & your team should navigate the entire decision matrix — based on the unique context you are operating in. At its core, you want to be clear about how you want to tradeoff the two basic constraints — time & information — for the types of decisions your product area needs. And then adjust your decision-making structures & culture to serve those tradeoffs. Doing this well requires an honest introspection of how you are making decisions today + what natural biases you & your team are bringing to the table.
As a thought exercise, here are some questions for you to consider to do this.
Does your organization tend to gravitate towards decision speed or decision quality? What are the main factors that determine these tendencies?
Does your direct team generally seek more decision autonomy or decision dependence? Why?
What time horizon are you and those around you working on? This may significantly influence how you make decisions today.
What are the major decisions you are trying to nail in the next few weeks? If you project ahead…where in the decision autonomy vs. decision dependence spectrum do you wish to land on for each of these decisions?
How can I clarify the nature of these decisions for myself & others? (hint: consider using a lightweight framework like SPADE)
This exercise is worth doing periodically as your organizational environment shifts & calibrates over time.
Footnote: decision-making polarity in the wild
While this post was geared towards PMs and Product leaders in tech, examples of the decision-making polarity are fairly common. Understanding the opposing forces at play can help us better resolve conflicts & challenges in many facets of life.
Some examples:
The COVID-19 pandemic reflected major societal division in the US around 2 camps: those advocating for collective response & sacrifice vs. those advocating for individual autonomy and choice. Sadly, the inability to manage this polarity well led to significant death/illness, economic harm & societal turmoil.
In US politics, the division of power of government into 3 distinct branches (executive, judicial, legislative) is a nod to the value of structurally balancing decision dependence & decision autonomy.
The next time you observe traffic calmly & collectively pull over to the side of the lane to let a firetruck, ambulance or police car pass by, consider the implicit tradeoff that was made collectively in favor of dependence to make that possible.