How do you use Tenets to make decisions more effectively?
Utilizing Tenets for faster decision-making.
Throughout my product management career, tenets have been critical for speeding up decision-making and effectively collaborating with cross-functional partners. In this article, I want to share what good tenets comprise and how one develops and uses them.
Product leaders who gain the trust and credibility of the organization possess the following qualities (in no particular order)
Clarity of vision
Strong conviction amidst ambiguity
Engaging communications
Demonstrated Impact
Clarity and conviction get you and the people around you moving faster. But to what end does your conviction simply cloud judgment? Have you considered tenets as an option in the toolkit?
Where Do Tenets Fit In?
We'll first talk about how tenets fit in with values and guiding principles because they will likely be confused. Here is a general breakdown:
Values are core beliefs that guide how you live and conduct yourself. They reflect the basic principles your organization lives by and shape your culture.
Example: We live and breathe our customers' problems. In other words, customer obsession.
Guiding Principles operationalize your value system into a set of guardrails on how teams make decisions. These can be company-wide or specific to particular product areas.
Example: We always question ourselves and the status quo as we seek to invent on behalf of our customers.
Tenets are tactical, actionable beliefs that anchor your team's decisions. They can be applied to different product surface areas such as Growth, Platforms, New Markets, or Developer Ecosystems. And yes, they are not only for the tech teams; they could be for anyone working in the product area.
Example for a customer-facing product: We are intentional with the data we show to our customers; any data without specific actions or context is a NO.
Why Do Tenets Matter?
Tenets outline the distinct actions and beliefs by which your team can navigate through the gray areas of decision-making involved in product development. Tenets ensure that any decision represents the values of your team and simultaneously relates to the real-world issues pertaining to the creation of successful products.
What Constitutes a Good Tenet?
Specific and Intentional: A good tenet should be clear, actionable, and intentional. In this way, tenets may guide direction on decisions for tangible situations. "Listen to the customer" is a nice sentiment, but a tenet such as "Prioritize feedback that solves the highest-value problems first" provides clarity.
It should be a decision-driven approach: tenets should directly inform the decisions. Whether in conjunction with your team trying to decide between paths A and B or driving clarity among stakeholders jostling competing priorities, tenets have to be on the top of your mind. This does not mean you stop experimenting, learning, and using data; think of tenets as a kind of always-on approach to decision-making, guiding the choice of the next best action.
Lined up with strategic goals: Tenets should not be arbitrary; they have to be connected as closely as possible with your wider business objectives. If your company is focused on rapid scaling, consider emphasizing Scalability over customization as you frame your tenets.
Evolve as you grow: Tenets are not static; they need to evolve as your team grows and changes, as well as with the evolution of the business landscape. What works for the scrappy startup may not work for the scaling enterprise. Revisit your tenets on a regular basis for relevance and actionability.
How to Develop Effective Tenets?
Lead with the pain points: Get to the real pain points of your team, such as slow decision-making, misalignment, or conflicting priorities. Tenets need to hit those pain points right on their head. Talk to your team, listen to your stakeholders, and find out where the friction is greatest.
Lean in on what's working: Insights go both ways; understand what goes behind good vs. bad decisions. Is there a set of people who are specifically good at decisioning? If so, how do they do it? What’s their framework? Do they have a set of tenets, or is that something you can codify and publish to help the rest of the organization?
A note of caution here: Refer to Annie Duke's 'How to Decide' and 'Thinking in Bets' for wisdom on ‘resulting’ - “Resulting is when you create too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome, good or bad, and the quality of the decision.”
Co-create tenets: Tenets are bottom-up and not top-down. Co-create the tenets with all the stakeholders that work on a given area (for example, a product-led growth team focused on customer onboarding) and will be able to stand behind them. The collaborative process is likely to result not only in better tenets but also in a feeling of ownership and alignment. Further, you gain the collective knowledge of what has worked and what has not in the past in the organization from the group.
Distill through iteration to a memorable set of core tenets: Take what you have gathered from the last steps and distill these into a set of core tenets that are crystal clear, memorable, and with a punch. You want to come out with three to five tenets your team can remember easily and use. If it is too fuzzy or wordy, continue the distillation process.
Test in the Wild: Not only would I write up your tenets and then move on, but also put them to work in real decision-making situations. Are they actually helping your team make better, faster decisions? Do they resonate in day-to-day discussions? Take that feedback and tune your tenets until they are actually useful.
Practice and Reinforce: Principles should not be set in stone. Embed them in your team's traditions-whether it's product reviews, design reviews, or even post-mortems. Celebrate and give kudos when principles are successfully applied, and refresh them as needed when they begin to not serve a purpose.
Examples of Tenets from my Past Experience:
[The following are some examples from my past product experience. Admittedly, some of the following look stale as these were pulled out of my past decade of experience in crafting these tenets.]
Always on the lookout for our members - consistently proactive every step of the way.
We should have visibility into 100% of consumer brands, their SKUs, and related domains, e.g. industries, trends, etc.
Celebrate the right moments in our customer's journey as they progress their way to improving their health.
We are an unbiased marketplace. In case of debates, we side with XYZ.
By constructing tenets that are clear, decision-driven, aligned with your goals, true to your team, and capable of evolving with time, you'll be empowering your team to do more than just move fast - you will enable them to move in the right direction.
But let's not forget that tenets are only as useful as their application: They have to be baked into the very core of your team's day-to-day, constantly driving choices and catalyzing the right conversations.
PLEASE SHARE YOUR EXPERIENCE WITH THE COMMUNITY:
Have you developed or encountered unique tenets that radically transformed your product thinking? Have you felt that you made mistakes in creating tenets? What was the setback, and what was its impact on the teams?