Decision making in product management and seeking broad feedback

Key points:

• It’s just not all about you
• Introduce diversity
• Implement a process
• Listen to the customer

A healthy ego can help to make you a success generally speaking. But this ego can get you into trouble when you make a decision unilaterally based on your thoughts alone. You are not reflective of all people. You are unlikely to be perfectly reflective of your ideal audience.

Good product managers know that their personal opinion, whilst valid, is not useful alone to steer them towards success. They realise that it is only the opinions of large proportions of potential customers that truly define success. They set out to learn what this is and they use what they learn to make decisions.

Not every decision is created equal

Something that seems to get lost in our society of late is that not all opinions are equal to one another. It is common to believe something but not necessarily know why you believe it. Sometimes it is just that it feels right to you. You may have picked up some information over time or you may have had a specific experience. Opinions that are informed are simply better. The more informed the opinion, the better and more valid the opinion is.

When it comes to making good product development and management decisions you just need to think of your opinion as being just as valid as anyone else’s. If you want to be successful, you will need to adjust your decision making to appeal to the majority and not yourself. let’s face it, if you had the capital to buy all the products you could produce then you probably wouldn’t need to build a business around it.

What most people forget when they are building products is that they are extremely unlikely to be representative of their ideal target audience. And even if they are an exact match, they should prove this rather than just believe it with no basis in reality.

Diversity helps you make a better decision

Having people in your business with different backgrounds and experience to your own helps to make better decisions. A study referenced on Forbes showed that a team with age, gender & geographic diversity and inclusion makes better decisions 87% of the time when compared with homogeneous teams.

There are many studies in support of this conclusion. The effects are also broader than just decision making.

A more diverse business can place more scrutiny on your assumptions when making decisions. It can provide a greater level of debate because people are coming from a variety of perspectives. This can sometimes make the process longer, although the results speak for themselves. It is a valuable tool in avoiding your standard group think and by its nature can help challenge your personal assumptions about your consumer needs.

Process can help to avoid your worst instincts

Having a robust process also helps mitigate bad decision making. Leverage data to prioritise your activities. Tools like air focus can work a treat – or simply leverage a simple google sheet with some calculations to help score and prioritise things.

Having a gated process or similar can also help you here. By providing criteria for assessment prior to progressing to the next stage of work you can ensure that proper thought goes into your product enhancements. A review of one such approach shows a correlation between adoption of these processes and high productivity within a business.

This is one of the reasons we steep our activity within the three areas of Product (what), Process (how), and Proof (why). By grasping all three of these elements you are well equipped to make good decisions for the future of your product and business.

Above all, listen to your customer

Nothing beats customer feedback. If you have an idea of what you think your customer might like, don’t just plough ahead; ask them.

You can implement a feature and see who buys it – this is expensive and risky. Alternatively you could ask current or potential customers whether they would like your idea. Build that up again by conducting some form of conjoint analysis to see what features they would purchase at what price level to optimise price vs. feature set.

A true lean approach might be to implement a sign up page to your theoretical product before you build it. Advise those who click through to purchase that it is not ready and you can place them on a list to be advised of future timing for launch. This could be further leveraged to split test price points to identify the best price to launch with.

In the end, nothing will perfectly reflect the reality of your product launch in terms of estimation. But if you listen to your current and potential customers you can get a hell of a lot closer without breaking the bank.

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