The Most Efficient Way to Resolve Complex Topics Within an Organization

Problem

Over the past years, we realized we had to adapt our decision making processes for two main reasons. First, the company grew from 15 to 150 people which brought a need for more structure. Second, as we went upmarket, our clients were larger, which meant bigger consequences in case of a bad decision. . As a result, when we were faced with very high level, business critical topics, s, the time that it took to make these decisions as a product team kept getting longer.

Action Taken

We invited high level stakeholders within the company to stay with us for half a day and we used that time to really explain the big trade offs and decisions we had to make. We took the controversial topics and we, as a team, had to make a decision on those questions in the time frame that we had with the stakeholders. It was really helpful to fly people in from New York for that. We did it several times and it was really worth it. We only use this strategy for the larger topics that we had a hard time coming up with answers for. After that, the stakeholders left and the teams worked on doing an MVP of solutions and were able to resolve these issues in a shorter time frame.

Lessons learned

We realized that we we started off too ambitious on what we wanted to achieve in one day and we ended up only getting around to doing maybe 50% of what we had originally planned. Focusing on the trade offs was the most important part. Also, we realized it's easy to underestimate the prep needed for this kind of workshop and it truly requires the Product Manager and the designer to spend a lot of time beforehand to do the proper research so that they don't come up empty handed: benchmarks, data, user research, etc.