A product manager’s guide to making design decisions

Product managers know that the roadmaps, backlogs and estimations are meaningless compared to the product itself.

The end-result must be something people love and are ready to pay for. And if we don't get there first, someone else will. Therefore, it's important for product managers to be able to make critical product decisions fast. 

The question is: what does it take to make those decisions?

1. Options over instincts

You can’t make a decision if you don’t know what your options are. That’s obvious, but most people don’t take ideation and brainstorming seriously enough.

The sad truth is that, in most cases, your first ideas are not the best possible solutions. These things take time.

A wise product manager gives space to the team to ideate and gives a little push to the team when they need it. 

Designers, for example, are typically creatives. It’s their profession to ideate, so they know how to do it well and how to involve other people, too. A good design team can help a lot in finding possible solutions to your problems. It’s much easier when someone maps the solution space for you and you just have to choose the best direction.

2. Customer insights over opinions

How many times have you been in a room with self-confident "leaders" arguing in circles over a decision? Surprisingly enough, asking more smart people to lend their opinions doesn’t always help you make better decisions. Only real customer insights can do that.

You as a PM need to be the one in the room who knows your customers the best. You have to know their pains, struggles, and successes. Their problems and goals. You even have to know them better than they know themselves.

To achieve that, you will need to get fresh customer insights regularly. You have to do interviews, user tests, field research, etc. It's time consuming but necessary. To do this, it's valuable to have a dedicated UX researcher on projects whose sole mission is to provide helpful customer insights to the team every week. 

3. Better questions over numbers

In our digital world, we have the luxury of being able to make decisions based on hard facts. But do we take advantage of that opportunity? Most people underestimate the effort needed to get useful data.

The best companies have dedicated data teams. If you don’t have one, you could still appoint someone from development to help you in answering the questions based on real data. But you will also need someone who can ask the right questions.

When many teams design apps, they might ask questions like "How many users tried this function within the first week?” But oftentimes, they just can’t get answers from the technology side.

This is why it's important to have someone who can ask the right questions and someone who can mine the data and come up with an answer.

4. Participation over bureaucracy

The best is when everybody is in the room when it comes to making decisions. Things can get slow when someone who has to be involved isn’t available.

Every party should be represented in weekly design meeting. Designers can present the ideas they've come up with in the last week and researchers can present user insights. Design, business and development can then make decisions together, on the spot.

5. Common ground for everyone

Sometimes you don’t even have to be involved in decision-making. If everyone is on the same page, your teammates can make decisions without you.

But how can you trust your developers, for instance, to know everything about your business and make the right decisions all the time?

If they too take part in product-planning brainstorming sessions and workshops, they won’t come to you with everything.

When working with a new team, do a persona workshop together to clarify who you're building the product for, and identify their goals, problems and motivations. Always insist that product owners invite not only marketing and strategy people, but also at least one person from the dev team. This way, you can make sure everyone is on the same page, even before starting anything.

PMs that apply these five simple directions into account make better product decisions, faster.

Brainstorm with the team, listen to customers, dive into the numbers when it's needed, invite everyone to build a common ground, and be there for the important moments.