Product Rituals: 3 secrets to get better feedback on your next proposal

How to make better, faster decisions with a group.

Jeremy Olson

Getting team alignment on tough decisions is hard.

As a Product Manager, sometimes it feels like the deck is stacked against you. You often need to drive towards decisions that meet at some ideal intersection of business needs, user needs, strategic leverage, technical feasibility, timeliness, cost, team interest, and sometimes dozens of other related factors.

Gaining personal conviction of the best path can be a tough climb in itself, and every stakeholder and conflicting interest can feel like pounds of rocks added to your load as you make the arduous climb towards a decision.

As pressure to unblock progress mounts and the decision feels stalled by conflicting interests, the worst feeling in the world is this emoji:

🤷🏽‍♂️

Apathy. The feeling of, “at this point, I care less about making the right decision versus just making a decision.”

I’ve been there. It stinks.

But I’ve also experienced the opposite. When, instead of adding drag to the process, your stakeholder group adds lift with valuable experience, perspective, and ideas that ultimately lead to a better decision, made in an efficient way.

3 simple tools have transformed my product proposals.

No tool is going to magically solve all your problems but the three below have helped me to repeat that “lift, not drag” group decision making process again and again and I’ve grown to depend on them for every major decision.

Each section includes a template for how to implement the tool. Click below to get started:

⁠