Good products are the outcome of good decisions. However you ‘do product’; whether working on a strategy or a roadmap; or working out which bits of a feature to prioritise, or who to hire and how to structure a team; whatever process you follow or however ‘empowered’ you feel: it’s the quality of the decisions you make that ultimately dictate success.
In 2016 Jeff Bezos dedicated a whole chunk of his letter to shareholders to ‘High Velocity Decision Making’. What he said (about one and two-way door decision, see below) was fascinating and has become business-lore, but just as fascinating is the fact he included it in the first place. How his company made decisions is such a part of the DNA, and he believed, a part of their future success that he felt the need to talk about it in his annual letter.
But how do you make good decisions quickly? If only there was a simple answer. Some of it is the benefit of experience and intuition that you just pick up over time. But there’s more to it than that: method and mindset as well as inspiration. And it’s something I’ve been quietly obsessed with.
My personal six rules for better decision making (a pretty lengthy post I wrote over at the Product Bugle