“Decisiveness is the ability to make decision quickly and effectively” — Rich Diviney, The Attributes
It recently struck me how decisiveness in leaders equally applies to product managers that I was fortunate enough to hone as a result of working in a fast-paced environment. This unspoken attribute can be found in product managers loved by engineers, designers, and stakeholders. Improving my decisiveness has had a stark improvement on me professionally that I wish to share why I think it's important and a few tactics that have served me well.
Product Management & Decisiveness
In the context of product management, decisiveness is the ability to continuously drive product decisions that enable teams to deliver customer and business value. This includes but is not limited to setting strategic direction (e.g. markets to enter, build or buy), translating user needs to product strategy (e.g. figuring out the crux of the problem, customer segmentation), making tradeoff decisions (e.g. new feature vs performance) and many more. As illustrated below:
moving too slow and you risk competitors catching up and out-executing you 😥
speed doesn’t matter if your direction is off 🙄
what we want is to operate like team A 💪
Key tactics
Break things down and take baby steps
Break tasks into smaller chunks and take baby steps to keep the momentum going. Suppose your task is to interview 5 churned users to understand key issues on product retention. Can you divide it further? Here’s how I would do it:
Pull a list of users from Redash who churned after one week of using our product
Email churned users with a screener for an in-person interview
Have at least 5 customers who qualify for 30mins interview by 20th May
Request five $50 Amazon gift cards as incentive
Schedule a meeting with researcher to finalize interview plan
Notice how I can make meaningful progress towards my goal in the next few hours with the new list? It looks easy but many junior product managers don’t do this.
Build a bias for action
Product managers wrangle with ambiguity all the time, and building a bias for action will help you lead the team into a state of clarity sooner than later. Just received a feedback on how X could be better? Act now. Been sitting on your desk planning things out for days? Act now. Have no idea how to approach a task assigned to you but do not want to look like an idiot? Act now. Frankly speaking, the longer you wait to act, the worse it gets. Take time to reflect and think about how you can actually shorten your time to action to drive better results.
Think about cost of delay
“Cost of delay (CoD) is a prioritization framework that helps a business quantify the economic value of completing a project sooner as opposed to later.” — ProductPlan
Ask yourself: "If I don't make this decision by <insert time horizon>, what's the cost of delay for my team/product/customers/business?" This requires gathering relevant information to reach a well-informed decision but should allow you to create a sense of urgency that fits the current state of the world you operate in. A positive side effect of this? You get to use this to set the right pace for your team too.
Conclusion
A lot of these seem obvious in hindsight, but I wished someone would’ve told me these when I was a junior product manager. It could’ve easily 2x my impact. If you've found this helpful, do share it across to anyone who you think could use a little help.