Essential PM Skills: Critical Thinking

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In the second post of his “Essential PM Skills Series”, PM Exercise’s Coach, Robert Hamilton, explains the importance of critical thinking.

Read on to learn more!

Critical thinking is a core skill for PMs, because it can help you to make better decisions and through that do a better job of supporting your team.

Listen along via Youtube if you prefer:

The role of a product manager is usually complex and messy. Over the years, I’ve seen people summarise the role in many different ways. Here are a few that have stayed with me:

1. “PMs do whatever the team needs most right now that no one else is going to do”
2. “PMs establish what the team should do and why they should do it. Others work out how to do it and when to do it”
3. “Determine and communicate what matters most, right now”
4. “Increase certainty and drive progress”

The last of these is probably my favourite, because it’s the shortest while also being deceptively simple. To execute well against that definition you need to understand where there is uncertainty and also to know what progress looks like. Going deeper, you have to find out which uncertainty is causing the biggest issues and where it is most important to make progress. Almost every decision a PM makes is a trade-off and you’ll be a stronger PM if you get better at trading off options, especially those which can’t be measured in the same currency (it’s not apples and oranges, it’s apples and elephants).

To reduce uncertainty, is it more valuable to know what proportion of the open bugs are duplicates, or to know when a partner team will deliver what you need from them? To make the most impactful progress, should we pay down tech debt or build those features our customers have been screaming for since last year?

This brings us to consider the nature of decision making as a skill. What are the hallmarks of a good decision maker? Jeff Bezos points out that “most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow”. That advice is often quoted, and the remainder of Bezos’ comments are worth repeating too; “Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure”. A good PM can determine the trade-offs associated with a decision — does it need to be made with a high-degree of certainty or made quickly? Bezos explains that easily reversed decisions probably don’t need so much deliberation. There can be value in durable decisions too — they are a great way to increase certainty and avoid thrash.

When coaching PM clients I often observe that there are three classes of situation they might need to handle:

1. Situations which need more attention and effort — perhaps folks aren’t taking a problem seriously, or they don’t have a sense of urgency;
2. Situations which need less energy and effort —  people are panicking unnecessarily, or spending time on something they could safely ignore;
3. Situations which are getting just the right amount of attention and effort — the project is on track and in good shape.

Recognising which of these classes any given situation belongs to will help you to decide where to focus your energy. You can ignore all the 3s. You can step in to calm down the 2s. You can shine light on the 1s to help others understand the need to get involved. Developing a spidey sense for when situations are about to move between classes will help you to be a proactive leader.
What all of this points to is that PMs must be strong critical thinkers. Yes, you have a sense of what matters and why it matters, but can you identify what matters most right now and explain why? The ‘explain why’ piece is something I will share more about in another post in this series, where I’ll underscore the value of communication skills.

Did you like this post? Check back soon for the next installment of Robert’s guest post series on the importance of empathy.

Interested in learning more from Robert? Book a session today for one-on-one coaching!