Help Others Make Good Product Decisions Too

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This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.

You’ve got a clear vision of where your product is headed. You can describe it three months out, six months out, maybe even ten years out. As you start to see success, you need to grow your team. Maybe it’s time to hire your first product manager or bring on your first full-time designer. Whoever it is, you know you can’t do it all by yourself anymore.

Or maybe you’ve already got a team. But you are the bottleneck. Everything still comes through you. You find yourself constantly explaining why an idea doesn’t fit in the long-term vision. Your team members are frustrated (and so are you) because they can’t seem to get it right the first time. Or the second or third time for that matter.

Whether you are a startup founder or a product leader, these are all too common scenarios. You bring a strong vision of where you know the product is headed, but you struggle to share that vision with others. How can you ensure that others can contribute in a way that’s consistent with where you want to go without having to do all the work yourself?

Again, drawing from the book, Decisive, the Heath brothers argue that you need to encourage other people to use their best judgment, you can’t be everywhere at once. But you also need their judgment to be consistent with your overall vision.

In order to do this, you must define and institutionalize your core priorities—creating guardrails that bound judgement. They should be wide enough to give people autonomy, but narrow enough that most people will make similarly consistent decisions.

This may sound obvious, but it’s quite challenging to do in practice. When it comes to product, the following elements can help set boundaries on how you and others can make sound product decisions.

Use a Strong Metaphor

Many products are built around a metaphor. Facebook and Twitter are built around streams, Pinterest a pin board, Pulse a magazine, and so on. What metaphor is your product based on? How does that restrict how you make product decisions? How should it restrict how you make product decisions?  The more explicit you are with your team about this metaphor, the easier it will be for them to make similar decisions.

Define Guiding Principles

Often times guiding principles are assumptions that you hold to be true. These are probably closest to what the Heath brothers refer to as guardrails. They often define how your product will differ from other products in its space. For example, a guiding principle at Apple might be, closed systems lead to better user experiences. Whereas a guiding principle at Google might be, open systems lead to more eyeballs. While Apple and Google both make phones, the guiding principles they use to make those phones reflect the unique perspective of each company.

What are your guiding principles? How do they differentiate your product from your competitors? Again, the more explicit you are about these, the easier it will be for others to make similar product decisions as you would.

Be Clear About What You Won’t Do

Your metaphor and your guiding principles define constraints around the creative landscape for you how will build your product. You aren’t searching for any solution, you are searching for a solution which falls within these constraints. Sometimes this can be hard for other people to grasp. You can help them by giving explicit examples of what you won’t do. Be clear about what falls outside of these boundaries. And no matter how tempting, be sure those things stay on your “Won’t Do” list.

What did I miss? What do you do to communicate the constraints and boundaries of how you define your product? How do you help others make good product decisions? Please share in the comments. 

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions.