The art and science of making effective decisions
I attended the inaugural Lenny & Friends Summit and one of my favourite takeaways was from Julie Zhou and Shishir Mehrotra who both shared tactics and frameworks for better decision-making
Last week, I was hand-picked to attend Lenny’s Summit for product leaders in San Francisco and it was a fantastic meeting of some of the best minds in product. It wasn’t too large – around 1,000 attendees, and so it still felt intimate and like you could easily make meaningful connections.
In addition to the incredible lineup of speakers, there were roundtables for discussions in small, intimate groups of about 10 people on over 100 topics – everything from product operating models at different stages, to how to scale your product teams and processes, to building your brand as a product leader.
These were super valuable because as you know, product theory and product in practice can be two very different things! The roundtables allowed us to unpack our chosen topic and share learnings and lessons with the group. As someone who is currently re-organising our team topology to be better aligned to value and outcomes, it was great to hear from the other leaders at my table who had just gone through a similar transformation, and some of the pitfalls to avoid!
Now, you can’t go to a summit like this – as power-packed as it was – and simply cover each of the talks in a paragraph or two and call it a day! So, expect a mini-series over the next couple of weeks where I’ll unpack each of the talks.
In today’s article, I’m going to do a deep dive on two related talks that really resonated with me, on the art of making better decisions.
How to Win Friends and Influence Decisions
Julie Zhou took us through the art of turning conflict into collaboration, breaking down her approach into 5 steps:
Draw a circle around the team, not just yourself. It’s not you vs them; align on what your shared goals are. Frame it as a collaborative process, and not you trying to convince everyone to come on your side. You might use a line like this; “So we all agree that we want to achieve [this outcome] or [this objective]”. Saying this also reinforces that you’re all on the same side, trying to achieve the same goal
Assume everyone sees the truth, even though we might all have different perspectives. The truth is that we all see some truth, but not the whole truth. She referenced this parable of the blind men and the elephant as a story that show why different perspectives help to build a richer picture. As PMs, we should seek the truth that captures everyone’s perspectives. You might use a line like this; “It looks like we’re seeing things differently and can all bring some very useful context. Let’s put together what we know and come up with a great outcome for the team/business/customer”.
Uncover where everyone sees the truth; essentially to deeper understand everyone’s perspectives. You might ask; “What happens if we don’t do [this]?” or “What would have to be true for us to believe that this is the right approach?”
Turn the problem into a data problem and look at what evidence you already have, or what data you would need. You might ask; “How can we quickly get a signal on whether this is the best option?” And if you can’t get good/enough data, then turn it into a people question. Instead you might ask; “Who is the best person to make this decision?” Ideally this person should have the right combination of context and skill, and they are also deeply invested in the end goal. And remember, it doesn’t have to be you just because you’re the PM. You don’t have to make all the decisions, you just need to identify the best person to make the decision.
Watch your replays. After a certain amount of time (after 3 months, and again at 6 months or 12 months afterwards) you should reflect on the decision and see if it was still the right call. Julie recommends actually setting a calendar reminder to do this. Review everything from the decision itself to the decision-making process; document it where useful. What were the learnings? A question to ask yourself and your team here; “What did we learn about the quality of our individual judgement?”
I loved Julie’s actionable framework, and the fact that it emphasised making your decision-making process not only evidence-based but also another opportunity to learn with your team how you collectively make decisions.
Rituals of Great Decision-Making
Shishir Mehrotra started off by talking about rituals, and how many of the great companies that we know of have a small list of golden rituals. These are processes that are named, templated, and every employee knows within a week of joining the company. He gave us examples including Amazon’s Six Pagers and Salesforce V2MOM. He went on to say that as a company we build two products – the product that we build for customers, but also the internal product (our culture and rituals) for employees. The latter is just as important to put effort into as it makes up the ‘operating system’ of your company.
He then talked about the rituals for great decision-making, and broke this down into 4 parts using some of their rituals at Coda as examples that could inspire our own rituals.
Ask the right questions. Here he talked about Eigenquestions and how it’s important to frame problems to allow the team to make the right call quickly. It’s a made up word (and if you’re interested, the link above explains how he came up with the word – it's to do with algebra!) but the premise is essentially this: “Which question, if answered first, will answer most of the other questions?” I honestly found this so profound that I might print it and frame it at home!
Following the right decision-making process. Once you’ve decided which is the priority question to answer, how do you actually make decisions? He gave so many examples, but the one that stood out to me he referred to as a two-way writeup or ‘Dory and Pulse’. Here, the driver of the meeting (and the one who’s needing a decision) sends out a writeup in advance and allows readers to add their questions to discuss (think Dory, the fish from Finding Nemo with alllll the questions) and then everyone votes on them to rank them. To reduce bias, there’s a toggle that hides everyone else’s Pulse until everyone is done. My key takeaway here was that there isn’t one ‘right’ way to do this, and the most important thing is designing a decision process that matches your company’s culture.
In the right decision forum. Next you have to think about where you’re going to have the discussion. This could refer to the physical location – for example, check out Pixar’s famous decision-making meeting called BrainTrust. However, here he also challenged us to think about how many standing attendees you have in these decision-making meetings. They probably start off nimble and lightweight, and then get to a point where there are so many people in the meeting and the topic being discussed isn’t relevant to half of them! He shared that at Coda there’s a standing meeting from 1-2pm every day in everyone’s calendar across the whole company. They have a system called the Catalyst where everyone comes into a doc to schedule their topics to be discussed plus who they need for the discussion. For each topic, people can indicate if they’re interested in attending and there’s an automation to send out the unique calendar invite for that time. Shishir said they found that they were making 10x more decisions a week, but that in some cases it removed the need for a meeting as the relevant people were sometimes able to come to a decision async.
With the right decision stakeholders. Finally, he talked about how you invite the right people to which meetings, describing another Coda ritual called Proactive Flashtags. They would share a list of upcoming decisions and everyone gets asked where they are on the spectrum of:
I don’t need to be involved;
Just let me know the decision;
I’d like to give my input; or
I may have strong opinions.
I thought about it like an advanced RACI of sorts, and an effective way to know in advance who needs to be at each session so you can prioritise getting the right people in the room.
Another really actionable session, plus it was great to hear so many examples of these rituals, not just from Coda but other companies as well – many examples to draw inspiration from!
Summary
I haven’t been to a product meetup or event for a few years and I didn’t realise just how much I missed hanging out with like-minded people, and in real life! And nothing about the event was fluffy or filler content – every talk was insightful, the roundtable discussions filled my head with ideas, and I left the day feeling like I really do have one of the coolest jobs in the world.
I took away some fantastic learnings from Julie and Shishir on how to make better, and more effective decisions. As product people, we do have to navigate complex challenges which require us to master the skill of making good decisions. Whether you’re trying to influence your stakeholders to align on a decision, or you need some inspiration for rituals to put in place to help you ask the right questions and answer them, I’m sure you’ll find some nuggets from these talks that you can use!
Coming up! Look out for the next article covering the rest of the talks from the summit. Make sure you’re subscribed to Product Breaks to get notified of every new post.