89: 3 Decision-Making Hacks for Product Managers

Decision-making is a core competency for product managers

Greg Prickril, who’s been a guest on the podcast, just did a LinkedIn post about the most important competency for product managers. He said it was “prioritization” – which I don’t disagree with. And one important facet of prioritization is decision making. And in this episode I give three (actually four) great hacks for making better decisions.

The hacks (or tips)

* One-way versus two-way decisions.

* Get perspective – the 10-day, 10-month, 10-year hack.

* It’s never just either/or – there are always more options.

* Pre-mortems – imagine the worst outcome from your decision, then imagine how that bad outcome came about, so you can mitigate it in advance.

Links

* Decisive, a fantastic book by Chip and Dan Heath on making better decisions. To be honest I swiped some of these hacks from Decisive.

Previous episodes

Some of my previous podcast episodes and articles on:

* Strengths and weaknesses (episode 84)

* Strengths: How To Be Better, Outsmarting Imposter Syndrome, Soft Skills For Product Managers

* Mental models and metaphors: Product Management Metaphors – Bad and Good, Mental Models for Product Managers (an article, not a podcast episode).

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Decision-making is a core competency for product managers

Greg Prickril, who’s been a guest on the podcast, just did a LinkedIn post about the most important competency for product managers. He said it was “prioritization” – which I don’t disagree with. And one important facet of prioritization is decision making. And in this episode I give three (actually four) great hacks for making better decisions.

The hacks (or tips)

* One-way versus two-way decisions.

* Get perspective – the 10-day, 10-month, 10-year hack.

* It’s never just either/or – there are always more options.

* Pre-mortems – imagine the worst outcome from your decision,