Product Review: Drive good decisions in five steps

Yousef Ghandour
5 days ago
5 min read

Product Decision making Process Template | Decision Making Infographic

One key job for PMs is to get to the desired outcomes without authority. Senior PMs excel at this skill by making the right product decisions most of the time, aligning everyone to get support, and execute perfectly.

Cognitive biases, such as overconfidence, the confirmation bias, excessive risk avoidance, etc will distort the way you collect and process information. Furthermore, with different stakeholders, and a diverse set of perspectives of the problem and solution spaces, making a product decision becomes a complex undertaking, which increases the risk of delaying getting to the desired outcome.

Product Review is an opportunity to make the right decision, align with the stakeholders, and get support for your team and your product.

Regardless of the topics you want to discuss in a product review, whether it is a product idea, a strategy, or a simple UI change, you will need to answer a lot of questions such as whether it is worth it or not? How will it fit in your organization’s overall strategy? How should you build it? How long? Do you even have the resources to build it?

“When the researchers compared whether process or analysis was more important in producing good decisions — those that increased revenues, profits, and market share — they found that “process mattered more than analysis — by a factor of six.” Often a good process led to better analysis — for instance, by ferreting out faulty logic.” ~ Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

Make Decision in five steps

The following five step process will help you think clearly about the problem and the solution. You don’t have to use the template attached to solve the problems. However, thinking about using this process will help you find better solutions and align with your stakeholders. I’ve used this process for thinking about a problem quickly with my team by using part of the template. In a more controversial situation, I expanded on the template to provide a big picture, strategic insights, and deep analysis. In its simplest form, use this process as a way of thinking and approaching product problems.

Step 1 of 5: Problem: Frame the problem

Frame the problem from the audience’s perspective

Clearly articulate what is the problem you are trying to solve and why. The problem could be generic to your review or specific to each section. Regardless, you want to walk your audience through your thought process and ensure they have the context and a shared understanding of the problem. The easiest way to achieve this is by describing the situation and what changed that created the problem you want to solve.

If I have an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution ~ Albert Einstein

Identify the users impacted by the problem. Whether this is a specific segment of users, a persona, or a type of users.

Frame your problem from the audience’s perspective, not from your perspective, especially if it contradicts what your audience thinks they know. Be aware that attempting to change the audience’s perception is hard, but doable, it is one of the unique skills of successful senior PMs.

To change your audience’s perspective, you need to share insights and a new/unique way of thinking about the situation and the problem. It would be a mistake to just share what you think and expect them to agree.

Additional tips:

Use data and insights to quantify the problem, and how this problem stacks against other problems.
For more complicated problems, you can use techniques such as issue-tree to better structure the problem.
Check McKinsey’s 7-Step Problem Solving Approach for more details on structural problem solving and the issue-tree.
Check A guide to problem framing for more ways to find or structure a problem.

Step 2 of 5: Options: Propose Multiple Options

Propose 2 to 5 opinionated, viable options

List a few of the options/solutions you’ve considered. Presenting one option is too little, and presenting six options is too much. Those are options that you’ve considered. Do not include phony options.

I want to see your solutions, two or three, nothing less. And you can’t have a phony one, a pig in a poke, and then the one you want but you’re scared of the politics. You’ve got to have real, viable options. ~ Rahm Emanuel, former White House Chief of Staff

If you can’t come up with more options, use the simple and extreme scenarios, and figure out what other options you’ve missed.

If you’re having troubling narrowing down an option set, consider going to a simple case and an extreme case. ~ Richard Zeckhauser, via Maxims for Thinking Analytically

If you have too many options, use the evaluation criteria (Step 3) to narrow down your top 2–5 options.

Step 3 of 5: Criteria: Develop a Decision Criteria

There are a few frameworks that you can use to help evaluate multiple options, one that comes to mind is the pros and cons. I sometimes use the pros and cons framework, however, for more complicated problems, developing and aligning on an evaluation criteria is the way to go for the following reasons:

Guide the decision-making process
By synthesizing the diverse perspectives of all stakeholders into a set of decision criteria, stakeholders will feel that their perspective is well represented.

Make sure to align on the decision criteria in the review before going into evaluating the options. In one scenario, one of the leads pointed out that we were missing a criterion. This helped capture his perspective that we missed, and ultimately, helped me get alignment on our approach.

Label each criteria with a letter. This will help your audience speak clearly about each criteria separately. Numbers for options, letters for the evaluation criteria.

Step 4 of 5: Evaluation: Evaluate the Options

Once you have your options and evaluation criteria, evaluate each option with precise and accurate data using either numbers or helpful description. Try to avoid low, medium, high when possible. Color-code your evaluations: Red — negative for the criteria; Yellow — neutral; and Green — positive for the criteria.

By coloring your evaluations, you communicate visually on how each option stacks against each of the the criteria.

Step 5 of 5: Recommendation: Make a Recommendation

Use the evaluation criteria to make a recommendation. The recommendation puts the interest of the company first, followed by your team, and then yourself.

Prepare to be wrong

After recommending an option, list the risks associated with the option. This will help you achieve two things

Your audience is more confident that you thought about the risks with your recommendations
It will help the audience accept or challenge your recommendations.

Additional Tips

Tip#1: Provide a summary or a TL’DR of the review at the top of your document. This will help your audience to understand the main topics you want to discuss and why they should care.
Tip#2: Set clear goals for the review, what will be covered and what is out of scope.
Tip#3: Replace adjectives with data. 2% increase in engagement, from 25% to 27% is much better than saying Better engagement.
Tip#4: Answer questions Directly. By answering directly and honestly you will build credibility, even when you don’t know the answer. The four direct answers are:

- Yes
- No
- A number
- I don’t know, and I will follow up when I do