Sunday Rewind: How to make product decisions with transparency and trust by Ellen Gottesdiener

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a ProductTank London talk from coach Ellen Gottesdiener that highlights some of the dysfunctions of decision making and offers ways to overcome them.

Ellen starts by looking at some of the process traps and pitfalls for product managers when they make decisions about strategy, tactics, discovery and delivery, namely: making decisions too late or soon, narrow framing, confirmation, anchoring, or overconfidence biases, having decisions overridden by the highest-paid person’s opinion, not engaging the right product partners or stakeholders. She says that product people can also get trapped by hidden agendas, ambiguous language, overly dominant people, a lack of group diversity, group-think, and overusing consensus.

But there are better ways for product managers to make decisions. Ellen says that research shows that a collaborative process, involving other people from the product ecosystem in the decision-making, helps to ensure that decisions are sustained. Product managers need to be transparent about the decision-making process to achieve this, as it helps to build contractual trust.

Ellen advises that product managers should “decide how to decide” with common decision rules. Her process for reaching the decision rule involves:

Watch the original talk: How to make product decisions with transparency and trust by Ellen Gottesdiener