Tradeoffs

As a product manager general process I follow:

Do your homework

• Understand the context
• Prioritize and/or align on goals with stakeholders
• Gather information

Build a case

• Prioritize plans based on cost, impact, severity and impact on business goals , long term impact
• mitigate risks – outline how to measure success vs. failures
• evaluate the alternatives – seek out help, customer feedback

Validate case

• involve the team
• communicate clearly
• quantify tradeoffs

Execute

• Monitor & adapt
• Learn & improve
• Continuous communication with stakeholders

Any problem that needs to be tackled – often has multiple ways to accomplish the solution. What ultimately becomes important – is to:

• Align on assumptions that we are making about a problem
  • Ex: We anticipate no. of users using the feature to scale to 1M in the next 2 years
• Constraints you are operating under: Is there a timeline that needs to be met?, What are we giving up by choosing solution x over solution y?
  • Ex: We need to deliver said milestones in the next 3 months – to help improve our $revenue for next quarter, solution x helps us scale to 1M & can be done in 3 months, where as solution y helps us scale to 100M, but needs > 3 months
• Know the limitations / Side-effects of said trade-off
  • Ex: No. of views users see on the page may not be realtime, but has 1s lag

Getting all stakeholders on same page for all of the above, helps teams make sound & informed decisions.

I use a data driven approach by ensuring there is a deep-dive on all alternatives. My approach to tradeoffs is around how to achieve the customer experience needed. I ensure there is an immediate path to green for a solution and a follow-up solution addressing the problem rightly.