178 / Phil Hornby: How To Make High-Quality Decisions That Stick

Phil Hornby is an experienced product leader, coach, and technologist whose mission is to help product leaders think clearly, make strong decisions, and take powerful action that drives high-impact outcomes. He’s a regular speaker at product events and is co-host of the “Talking Roadmaps” YouTube channel and podcast.

If Phil were asked to distill product management down to its core, he’d tell us, “We’re paid to have an opinion.” Not simply putting a ‘licked finger to the wind,’ but trusting your experience and intuition to make high-quality decisions. Ah, and also to remember: there’s a difference between a high-quality decision and the “right” decision. There’s no way to guarantee that we make the right decision, Phil says, but there’re plenty of ways we can improve our odds.

Here’s what we learned:

Empowerment Is ‘Making Decisions that Stick’

At its most fundamental level, doing Product is decision making, Phil says. “That that’s like the whole heart of it. When we use the term empowered to describe product teams, we talk about their ability to make decisions that stick. If you can’t make a decision stick, then you’re not empowered. It’s really boiled down to this: empowerment is at the heart of all product work.

Trust = Character + Competence

Trust is an essential component in any relationship. Perhaps even more so in the often high-stakes world of product management. Phil’s hypothesis is that high-quality decision making cannot occur in its absence.

“Trust comes down to two core components,” he says, “character and competence. You want others to look at you and say, ‘That’s someone I can trust.’ That’s the character…. Then there’s competence: ‘Do I think you can make it? Have you got the skills to make that high-quality decision? And those two things combine to provide trust.

‘We’re Paid to Have an Opinion’ – Evidence-informed Decisionmaking

Phil talks about being evidence informed versus data driven, because “data can tell you anything. As product managers,” he adds, “I can massage the data to show whatever the heck I want it to do.

“We absolutely need to bring data into our decision-making process,” Phil continues. “Data is a form of quantitative evidence, but then we need the anecdotes and other feedback to complete the equation. But we’re humans, we also have intuition. And, dare I say it, we are paid to have an opinion – to understand our markets, to bring that tacit knowledge, which some people call product sense, and apply it to the context of the situation we’re in.”

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Catch the entire episode with Phil Hornby and learn even more about:

• His 6-step process for raising the odds of making a high-quality decision.
• How product roadmaps reflect your team’s decision tree of what to do and when.
• Why strong opinions are valuable, as long as we’re open to the opinions of others.

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