3 Ways to Make Decisions as a Product Manager

To maximise your benefit to the company (and your career)

Product managers (PM) regularly face the need to make decisions about product development. You could even say that a PM is the person who makes decisions and takes responsibility for them. This is his or her key function.

There are 3 core ways to arrive at a decision. When making your product development choices you can justify them based on:

1. Hands-on experience.?Best for minor tasks, e.g. product interface text, or when you don’t have enough data describing user behaviour (e.g, if there are just 10 product users, your choice of the registration form can only be based on your expertise).
2. Data-driven decision making.?Best for large products with a large user base especially because facts obtained through analysis often differ from our knowledge and experience.
3. Corporate strategy. At times the overall strategy contradicts both the expertise of a PM (1) and the results of experiments (2). This is when communication with internal stakeholders is extra important - more on that below.

How can you simplify your life and make better decisions? What should a PM do to maximise his or her benefit to the company?

Let's look at each type of decision separately.

Decisions based on expertise.

Easy to talk about, not so easy to execute.

• Saturate your experience with high-quality examples that are already out there: study competitors' products, read company blogs and experts newsletters. Or take it a step further - try creating your own product.
• Accumulate your experience. This point is essentially a continuation of the first. The more products you study or create, the more experience you have and the greater your expertise.
• Study related markets or markets that are significantly different from your product's market. For example, if you work with b2c products, study b2b products. This will allow you to look at solutions within your products from a different angle. Communicate with experts in markets that are not familiar to you, draw new knowledge and approaches from other industries.

All these approaches will build up your?expertise. It will take some time and extra effort. But if you are already a PM, you will not be deterred by this, you already know what it means to work hard to achieve extraordinary results.

Data-driven decisions.

In order to make data-driven decisions, data must somehow be obtained. I've covered?How does a product manager set up a process to collect data for their product? ?earlier. Here are the basic approaches:

• Conduct user research, use quantitative surveys, custdev and conversational research.
• Collect data on events describing user behaviour and analyse it afterwards.
• Conduct experiments, for example - A/B tests.

For a PM, data is your eyes and ears. With data, you can make best possible decisions and also track the consequences of your decisions, whether they helped you achieve your goals or not.

Decisions based on corporate strategy.

In order to make decisions consistent with your company's long-term strategy, you have to study the strategy. But don't just do it in your bubble, talk to people:

• Get together with your manager and stakeholders and discuss long-term company needs (don’t just focus on putting out current fires).
• Communicate your plans and the results of your work to all stakeholders. It's good for staying aligned with company goals AND for your own visibility and public profile within the company.

A PM needs to be in contact with other decision makers within the company. If you fail to do that you might just get very good at improving metrics that are completely irrelevant to your company and don’t help it in any way.

PM’s job is difficult because decision making under uncertainty is a big risk. Mitigate this risk by building your expertise, collecting and analysing data, and communicating with others in the company. This will help you make decisions that push your company (and your career) forward.        

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