Should I research or just experiment?

As humans, or rather living beings, we make countless decisions everyday in our lives and at work. Should I sleep or read a book/watch a movie? What should I do this Sunday? What should the roadmap for my pod look like for the next quarter? Some decisions require us to spend more time on them, while some don’t. Not all decisions need the same process.

I’m currently working as a product manager, and I make so many decisions everyday, it’s boggling. I look at my managers and the people leading the company and wonder how they must be feeling. There would be so many issues that would require their attention everyday, they would be receiving so many mails and slack messages, people would look up to them to take high stakes decisions. So how can one distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s important? How should one identify the decisions they should focus on?

The first important step in decision making is to identify the decision type.

While taking decisions at work, there are two important factors that we need to consider

1. What are the consequences of taking this decision?
2. If something does not work out, can I reverse this decision?

Based on the above two factors, we will then have 4 possibilities on the type of decisions.

What exactly are consequences and what is reversibility?

Most of the decisions that you take have consequences, and in the age of tech, most decisions are reversible. You can say that a decision has major consequences and is irreversible if

1. Its impact on people is high
2. Cost involved is high
3. Risk involved is high
4. Reach is high

We need to also keep in mind the intangibles (PR nightmares, employee morale etc ) while classifying the decision type

An example for each decision type

1. Consequential and Irreversible: Consider Amazon’s venture into hardware devices such as Fire, Kindle and Alexa. These decisions have huge impact on the company’s current and future brand image, a lot of effort would also go into development, so this decision will have consequences and will be irreversible.
2. Consequential and Reversible: Let’s say that your team is redesigning the landing page of your website and wants to conduct few experiments. The team can take time and do A/B tests to find out the ideal landing page. This decision is reversible as you are running experiments and you can revert your code but it has consequences as the experiments will tell you how to optimize your landing page to maximize your goals.
3. Inconsequential and Irreversible: A company deciding its branding guidelines, specifically the colours and fonts that they want to use for their communications. This is an inconsequential decision as it has no major impact, cost or risk involved but irreversible as once your guidelines are fixed, the brand needs to maintain consistency for a long time.
4. Inconsequential and Reversible: Prioritizing between your tech debt, bugs and features for your quarter. This decision affects the PMs and the developers the most, hence this should be delegated to them. The PM/EM can choose to reprioritize the tasks for the quarter basis necessity.

If you are having a difficulty managing your time at work, do try out this decision matrix to identify which decisions you can focus on and which decisions you can delegate.

Thanks for reading! 😃 If you have any questions or anything to share, leave a comment!

References

I learnt about the decision making matrix through the course below. The course helps PMs take product decisions confidently. The overall experience was great, and I have already started applying the learnings at work

Decision Making for Product Managers

The Decision Matrix: How to Prioritize What Matters - Farnam Street

Other interesting decision matrixes

Eisenhower Matrix: Master Productivity and Eliminate Noise - Farnam Street