Decentralised Decision Making requires Context

“What if the teams waste time on unimportant areas?”

One of the biggest fears for management teams when empowering product teams is that they lose control over the features that the teams build.

In a project structure, management teams get the final say over every feature that is being developed. This means they can be confident that the product is aligned with the strategic goals of the business.

But many companies have figured out how to successfully empower teams and keep them aligned.

High quality decisions require clear value and principles, strategic context, experience and incentives.

Let’s dig into each of these to see how you can increase your confidence in the quality of the decisions that decentralised teams make.

Shared Values and Principles

A lot of companies publish their values and principles but they are so vague that they are not really helpful. This is a missed opportunity because spending time to figure out what is truly important for the company and how it should work can streamline a lot of future decisions.

There are some good examples of companies doing this the right way. Amazon famously use their leadership principles in their recruitment process and only hire people who align with their culture and way of working. Intercom have also done a great job of defining their product principles broken up into different principles for research, design and development.

Putting clear and actionable principles in place let people make better decisions. For example, the principle “Be technically conservative” would help teams decide on the technology to use for a new feature and push back on the urge to try the latest shiny framework.

Strategic Context

Often teams only know the outputs that they ask tasked to deliver. This means that the decisions they make can appear misguided to those with more strategic context. In order to scale high quality decisions we need to ensure that everyone has the same background knowledge about the business and product goals.

This is where the long-term product vision, medium-term product strategy and short-term product objectives come in.

When the team knows the broad direction as well as the current constraints that the product is facing, they will be able to make the hard choices around which features should be prioritised over others.

Incentives

There is an old saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. What this means is that even though you have the best strategy, principles and values, the behaviours of people in the company might not be aligned with your ultimate goals. This is where KPIs come in.

We’ve all seen the lip-service paid to being team players but then some of the managers can be very aggressive and eager to point the blame. We’ve also seen companies tout the importance of hitting the outcome goals but then the KPIs that people are tracked on are still time and cost.

Unless the KPIs that govern who is hired, fired or promoted are aligned with the principles and strategy then it will not succeed. People with put their own interests first.

Experience

The final element is experience. Seasoned professionals can draw from years of industry knowledge, customer needs, market trends, and potential pitfalls when making prioritisation decisions. While there is definitely a preference for a skew towards more experienced team members, more junior team members can challenge established norms and introduce innovative ideas. They key is finding the right balance.

Bringing it all together

It is much easier for senior management to sign off on the scope of projects instead of trying to share all of the context that leads to good decisions. But the centralised approach leads to poor outcomes. For companies looking to scale more effectively, putting in place the means of sharing the necessary business context with the right incentives can lead to much higher quality decisions across the board.