Mastering product decisions through risk and reversibility with Dalia El-Shimy | Wise
Oct 22, 2024
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Dalia El-Shimy, Director of UX Research at Wise and former Head of UX Research at Miro, brings her extensive experience in UX to the table. She discusses a framework for confident product decision-making by categorizing choices based on risk and reversibility. Dalia emphasizes the importance of balancing emotional instincts with logical reasoning and promotes swift actions for low-risk scenarios. Additionally, she shares insights on integrating informal user interactions with formal research to enhance product development and explores the dynamics of team decisions.
Dalia El-Shimy emphasizes the importance of combining informal user conversations with rigorous research to ensure comprehensive insights for decision-making.
The fear of regret significantly impacts individuals' decision-making processes, highlighting the need for organizations to cultivate a culture of learning and confidence.
Employing a decision-making matrix helps teams visualize and classify decisions, facilitating better communication and ensuring the appropriate level of research is conducted.
Deep dives
The Importance of Rigorous Research
Engaging with users is crucial, but it does not replace the need for formal, rigorous research. High-risk decisions require comprehensive information gathering to mitigate potential negative consequences. Conducting formal user research provides insights that informal conversations may overlook, ensuring that teams can make informed choices. Emphasizing the necessity of structured studies helps teams navigate complex scenarios with increased confidence.
Decision-Making Challenges
Many individuals struggle with decision-making due to the underlying fear of regret, which can impede timely choices. This fear can vary from trivial decisions, like what to order at a restaurant, to significant business decisions that may affect entire teams. The concept of decision disorder highlights the difficulties companies face when trying to make effective decisions at scale, especially as organizational hierarchies shift. Fostering a culture that encourages learning decision-making skills across all levels is essential for enhancing overall confidence.
Understanding Types of Decisions
Decisions can be classified based on their reversibility and associated risks, which helps in determining the appropriate approach for each scenario. High reversibility, low risk decisions may not require extensive research, while high risk, low reversibility decisions warrant more careful consideration. Recognizing this framework allows individuals to gauge how much time and resources should be devoted to making distinct types of decisions. This structured understanding fosters a balanced approach to decision-making, emphasizing efficiency without neglecting necessary caution.
Framework Application in Teams
Utilizing the decision-making matrix aids team members in collaboratively identifying the nature of their decisions and the appropriate level of research required. By visually plotting decisions on a framework, teams can engage in discussions that clarify perspectives, ultimately aligning efforts towards informed choices. This approach not only enhances communication but also allows researchers within teams to express their insights and concerns effectively. When researchers share this framework with their teams, it creates a shared language around decision-making confidence and strategy.
Balancing Informal Insights and Formal Research
Informal conversations with users can provide valuable insights but should not be seen as a substitute for rigorous research methodologies. Differentiating between informal discussions and structured research is vital for clarity and objectivity in decision-making processes. While informal user engagement can uncover valuable qualitative signals, formal studies are needed to ensure representative and replicable findings. Companies must embrace both methods to cultivate a comprehensive understanding of user needs and informed decision-making.
Dalia El-Shimy, Director of UX Research at Wise, presents a framework for navigating product decision-making with confidence—from daily product decisions to the most complex and high-risk scenarios. Dalia shares how to classify decisions based on their level of risk and reversibility, along with questions and tactics to help determine the type of research or insights needed to better inform those decisions.
About Dalia:
Dalia is an engineer-turned-academic-turned-user-researcher. She is the Director of UX Research at Wise and the former Head of UX Research at Miro, where she helped build the team and discipline from the ground up. She started her career as a human-computer interaction researcher, then joined Shopify, where she helped scale the UX Research practice from a few researchers to a team of 60+ strong and co-led the craft across the entire organization. When she’s not busy asking too many questions, she enjoys baking, eating, reading, and obsessing over all things David Bowie.