At the graduation event of the last CPO Bootcamp, as we were sitting together and each participant shared what they took away from the program, there was a topic that kept coming up: the participants talked about how the program reshaped their understanding of the product leader’s role. One of the interesting things I noticed was that many spoke about how they realized they could lead and impact areas where they didn’t have any formal authority.

I often describe the product leader’s role as the one of an orchestra conductor: you don’t play any of the instruments yourself, but you have both the responsibility and the means to make sure everyone plays together in harmony. 

One of the areas in which the participants saw that specific quality coming to life was decision-making. Many companies struggle to make strategic or complex decisions, for a reason: the impact is immense, there is no right or clear straightforward answer, many people need to be involved in the decision-making process, and it’s hard to decide when each has their own opinion. As the product leader, you can’t decide for everyone, but you can definitely help everyone decide and move forward. Here is a quick method that will help you get your peers out of the confusion darkness and back into action mode.

Step 1: Acknowledge the Untold Truth

You have all been there. You know there is a major decision that needs to be made. You have been debating it for what seems like forever. But still, no one makes the call. On one hand, it’s not for you to decide, but on the other hand, you know things cannot continue like this. 

One of the reasons organizations tend to leave decisions hanging, is that people are not aware of the cost of not deciding. Many people live as if everything is open until a decision is made, and it’s great to leave everything open. But in reality not deciding has its own cost regardless of the decision you would be making eventually: be it the time to market of embarking on a new initiative, or simply the confusion of people in the company when it comes to the smaller decision that they need to make in their own domains.

To encourage management to make a decision, you want to call out this often untold truth: you need to decide one way or the other because not deciding is a problem in and of itself. This is a great first step in creating urgency around the decision itself and getting everyone back in the discussion, with the right mindset to move forward.

But this is often not enough. Most of the time, everyone around the table had been here before. They were discussing it previously and weren’t able to make a call and move forward. Many times, the reason is that there is another untold truth that lies behind the scenes. It could be something like “this employee does more harm than good”, “we can’t meet all of these goals together”, “we have a serious issue with our product/strategy/specific department or process”, or anything else.

Many times, people would be thinking these things but never say them out loud. But more often, people wouldn’t even have the guts to say it to themselves. By calling out such truths, you would typically run into one of two situations: either people feel the same way and would agree with you simply because you were courageous enough to say it out loud, or people struggle with it and disagree. Either way, once you brought it up boldly, it can no longer be ignored. Both agreement and disagreement are desired outcomes. The latter would foster a discussion about what really matters – how you and others see the situation. Even if you don’t convince each other right away, you end up in a much better position than where you started, since at least everyone clearly understands what the disagreement is.

Step 2: Highlight the Impact

Sometimes, people would agree with you in general, but would not be willing to make any sacrifice. When you make a hard decision, it usually means you are compromising on something that is important to you (or otherwise it wouldn’t be hard, you just give up on things that don’t matter as much). For someone (yourself included) to be willing to even consider such a compromise, they need to be convinced that the problem is really severe. 

Much like when you create your product strategy and delve into the problem you are solving for your customers, you want to stay with the pain for a while before you move on to possible solutions. Clarify for yourself, and then for everyone else, what the impact is of the current situation. You can talk about the impact of not deciding as I suggested in the previous section, but also about the impact of the situation as is. When your sales process doesn’t work properly, for example, explain how it impacts the entire company. 

Don’t take it for granted that everyone gets the impact. Even in a relatively simple example like the sales process, people don’t always fully grasp the impact. In order to get them to get it, go beyond the simple and straightforward impact. In the sales process example, the immediate impact could be that sales don’t convert quickly enough or at high enough rates (note that even this is already much more specific than “sales don’t work”). But there are always additional layers of impact that you want to look for: perhaps people spend too much time on each deal, leading to good leads not getting any attention. Perhaps over time it churns your salespeople and causes the company to spend a lot of time and money on recruiting and training new ones. 

Don’t move to the next step until you feel everyone gets the impact and understands its severity.

Step 3: Suggest Alternatives

Remember that our goal here is to help the organization make a decision, not just acknowledge a problem. The best way to do that is to suggest alternatives. It also positions you as a problem solver and not just as the person who tells everyone else what they are doing wrong. 

Of course, to be able to suggest alternatives that work for everyone, you need to understand everyone’s perspective on the matter. Ask yourself what is important to each and every person involved. If you are not sure, ask them directly how they see the situation. 

Once you do that, my recommendation is to first sit with yourself and think about how you would solve the situation, if it had been your decision to make. Note that you need to do that only once you have seen everyone’s point of view since the idea here is not to decide from the product position, but rather from the CEO or real decision maker’s position – one which takes everyone else’s input into account.

It is not as important that you make up your mind which alternative is better at this point. Remember, your goal here is to help the organization make a decision, so it’s perfectly fine to bring a few options to the table and debate them. In fact, that’s an important step even if you think one alternative trumps everything else. 

Step 4: Debate and Decide

Since it was not your decision to make to begin with, you must go back to the discussion table and help the real decision-maker decide. Layout the alternatives you identified, describe – as objectively as possible – the pros and cons of each option, and let the team debate. 

If you followed the steps described above, it should be relatively clear at each point where the disagreement is: do people disagree with the hard truth that started the discussion? Do people disagree that these are the only alternatives? Is there something specific about a specific alternative that doesn’t resonate with them?

If you feel the team loses track of the discussion, you can always bring it back to focus by summarizing what you do agree on, and what the open questions are. Here, again, don’t take it for granted that people know it just as well as you do. Calling it out explicitly often helps people re-center around the specific questions that are truly important.

One of the problems with complex decisions is that oftentimes it’s unclear who the real decision-maker is. If that’s the case, and even after a decent debate following the method suggested above you can’t decide unanimously, it’s perfectly fine to ask the question ‘whose decision is it anyway?’ That, too, might create the clarity needed to move forward.

Take it upon yourself to be the facilitator of the discussion and help it converge. Remember, even if the decision is not yours to make, you are in a unique position to make it happen nonetheless. In fact, in many cases, it is actually your responsibility to enable that decision to be taken, and you will always be doing a great service to your company by doing so.