The Maker's Mark

I’m struck by the verb we so often use to explain what we humans do to decisions: we make them.

To make is a verb of creation, craftsmanship, and construction. That’s the same word we use for making art, making furniture, or making sandwiches. Decisions aren’t just reached or determined or issued — they’re constructed. This little bit of linguistics reminds us that wisdom requires creativity, and that analysis and discernment are a maker’s skills.

Decisions, like most human-made things, are imperfect. One of the first traps anyone making a decision must dodge is the snare of certainty. The skilled decision-crafter considers probability, implication, and reversibility, not just optimal outcomes.

The next trap is paralysis, born of fear of failure, with its awful outcome, inaction. I like decision frameworks that emphasize the importance of getting to action and execution. Amazon’s two-way door or one-way door is a great mental model here. If you’re not familiar with this concept, TheProductGirl recently wrote a great summary of it. I especially like her diagram.

Because decisions are made things, a good decision-maker will carry a toolbox well-stocked with models and methods. In this month’s Pollinator, we share several of SDG’s favorite frameworks for making good product decisions. You’ll probably find these resources helpful for establishing product priorities and evaluating value in your product careers, but they’re also applicable for day-to-day decisions in your personal life. Though if you bust out a 2×2 grid at a restaurant when you’re deciding whether to choose fish or chicken, be prepared to at least receive some funny looks. Such is the curse of the decision-smith.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

A simple question: would the opposite decision be stupid?

Check it out: Is or Is Not the Opposite Stupid on its Face?, Roger Martin

Management guru Roger Martin suggests a question for strategic decision-making that is so obvious that it’s brilliant. As you’re devising a differentiating business or product strategy, ask yourself: would the opposite decision be stupid on its face? 

If the opposite choice is obviously suboptimal, or just plain dumb, then your choice isn’t strategically meaningful. Martin puts such decisions in a category he calls Operating Imperatives. An Operating Imperative might still be important, but it is not a strategic choice. Strategic decision-making should be distinctive, not merely the opposite of stupid.

Here’s an example. Say you’ve noticed that a group of customers are abandoning your product early in the getting started process. Imagine you decided that a differentiating strategic choice will be to give them a smooth, friction-free onboarding process.

But the opposite of that, giving users a clunky onboarding process, is stupid on its face. “Let’s make onboarding easier” might be an important operating imperative, but it isn’t a strategic decision. It probably won’t be a meaningful and durable differentiator for your product.

A strategic decision in this situation might be to design a product where getting started is enabled by a community of fellow users. The opposite strategy would be to customize the experience for an individual user. But that opposite strategy isn’t stupid on its face. Now we have made a strategic choice.

“Is or is not the opposite stupid on its face?” is blunt, sure, but that’s why it is so appealing. Consider it the next time you think you are choosing a strategic differentiator. You might merely be identifying a UX or an engineering problem that you need to clear up.

I like big bets: an interview with Slack’s Chief Product Officer

Check it Out: How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer. First Round Review

Noah Desai Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack, the popular workplace communications and productivity application. Weiss has an impressive history in product leadership, with stints at well-known tech innovators like Google and Foursquare. In this profile of Weiss from First Round Review, he shares his simple three-step process for making high-quality product decisions.

Distilled, it looks like this: Share Context; Build Trust; Consider Risk. You’ll notice that this process includes a lot of human leadership in action — it’s designed to motivate and bring along a team. But Weiss also cautions against making decisions through consensus.

I also appreciate Weiss’s perspectives that might contradict common product advice, like “You can’t experiment your way out of every product problem.”

Make decisions like Nielsen Norman Group makes them: by understanding your users — Recommended by SDG’s Jared Johnson

Check it out:

• A Guide to Using User-Experience Research Methods, Nielsen Norman Group

• UX Research Cheat Sheet, Nielsen Norman Group

Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) is well-known UX consulting, training, and certification organization. The firm’s founders, Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, are pioneers in the field of user experience, and NN/g continues to lead user-based research and design methods. As creators of countless usability pattens and foundational models, the team at NN/g has literally written the books on how to learn, consider, inform, and create valuable concepts to apply to everything from intranet usability to social media to mobile usability.

As a UX strategist and consultant, when I’m helping companies and teams make design decisions, I guide them to the intersection of user-centered design, product, and engineering principles. NN/g’s Guide to User Research Methods and UX Research Cheat Sheet are among the tools I use every day.

From what research methods to deploy and when—or how—to how to apply these learnings to business objectives or key performance indicators, NN/g’s models help teams strike a balance in iteratively delivering value to a user base. They help cross-functional product teams make decisions that balance product’s business representation, engineering’s technology perspective, and design’s end-user knowledge. By starting with the user, you can make decisions resulting in a valuable, feasible, and usable solution for the market you’re serving.

—Jared Johnson, SDG Consultant specializing in User Experience Strategy and Design.

Quick Takes: a few other resources on decision-making for product

• The Cynefin Framework. Based on an old Welsh word meaning something like “the influence of environments,” cynefin (pronounced ku-NEV-in) starts by determining one of four (or five, if you count disorder) contexts where we are operating: chaos, clear or obvious, complex, and complicated. The steps you take to reach a decision vary depending on which boundary you are operating within. In this YouTube video, the framework’s originator, David J. Snowden, describes cynefin’s fundamentals. Check it out: The Cynefin Framework - A Leader's Framework for Decision Making and Action (YouTube) 

• OODA loop. This is a venerable framework developed by an American military strategist, Col. John Boyd, to train fighter pilots in the 1970s — and now it is used extensively in business and product. OODA is an acronym for the four stages of Boyd’s decision-making process, Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. Importantly, OODA is described and depicted with feedback loops in between each stage, so we can always re-orient based on new observations. I like the separation of Decide from Act. And I love the loops. Check it out: The OODA Loop (The Decision Lab) 

• FOCUSED framework. FOCUSED is another acronym-based mnemonic. It stands for Frame-Observe-Claim-Unfold-Steal-Execute-Decide. I especially like Steal as a step in a decision-making process — it doesn’t mean actual larceny, but examining ideas from competitors or even from unrelated contexts. This post from Natalia Maksymenko summarizes it neatly. Check it out: A Product Discovery Framework (No, not “Opportunity Solution Tree”) 

• The Uncertainty Project’s Decision Architecture. The Uncertainty Project is an initiative dedicated to helping business, product, and technology leaders make better decisions. They recently published a list of decision architecture patterns. The most valuable part: each pattern includes deeper links, so the entire thing is a great way to enter delightful rabbit holes. Check it out: Patterns of Decision Architecture (The Uncertainty Project)

Outside the Box

Ohio State University’s Sports and Society initiative maintains a helpful collection of links to downloadable player statistics and other sports-related data sets. It’s a great resource for the geeky sports fan (I’m one). Check it out at https://sportsandsociety.osu.edu/sports-data-sets

About The Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue is a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.