Issue Trees - A not-so-data-driven Approach To Your Strategy
Numbers seldom prevail over gumption
You’re a shot of macchiato, thanks a lot for coming here!
Means a lot to me.
It goes without saying that yet again, I stand ready to push forward my suggestion of intellectual bullshityness. However, my methods of writings are flawed and not substantial my means. Afterall, I do find writing to be incredibly tedious.
But I am a sucker for playing the hero against my psyche, and there is a boundless opportunity to bring forth the utterance of my conscious and dispense it using these computer generated pixels.
Every interpretation is hypothetical, and lately I have been trying to interpret everything in my job based on causal factors, numbers, dashboards if I must say. Each instance of product management is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar story - which constantly redraws itself as users, markets, technological shifts, and lately…Generative AI.
The product management community loves to be data driven. Since 2023, I have made a plethora of dashboards, user drop off funnels, behaviour analysis models and what not. But no matter the effort or efficiency, there are instances when the data is simply not there. It is an inescapable scenario; I have stared at blank spaces innumerable times wondering where my key metrics are - no amount of critical reservation has ever enabled me to justify a decision without anything quantifiable to lean on.
”All hail the data-driven product community” - I confess, I exclaim, and I rant.
My frustrations have often found themselves melting into acceptance - acceptance of the fact that features/products/websites are improperly instrumented and customer interactions are more qualitative than quantitative.
Conversations drift toward what can be measured rather than what should be measured. And I am guilty of participation - I mostly am. How would I stand true to my act of intellectual bullshitting otherwise? I must do what I preach.
And so I tend to lean towards Issue Trees.
Deconstructing a problem statement for a non-data driven assimilation is often a good mental regime, and I find the process quite tedious, but thrilling in its very essence. Issue Trees also help to mask nonsense sometimes which is my favorite part, in all fairness.
Here’s one for instance - quick context: I was in a discussion to address high churn rates for a newly launched hybrid cloud management product.
I made this as sloppy as I could - but hey I needed something rather quick.
Now, there exist different strategies and categorises of such issue trees but for sake simplicity, I decided to stick to something straight out of gumption.
I have now ran out of ideas and words to push this any further but I hope, as always, you got some value out of my impulse of sharing knowledge.
See you next time!