Srilakshmi's Blog

Some of the most intense emotional responses in product management occur when five key areas of social experience collide. Intentionally or unintentionally — we’ve all been guilty of triggering them in team members. Perhaps you’ve had an experience similar to mine? Here’s what happened when I wasn’t aware of a few simple brain-based techniques for avoiding mistakes that cripple collaboration… As a software executive, I once oversaw a team working to bring a new solution to market. Within this group were two individuals who did not work well together. In fact, the person tasked with leading the effort didn’t value the education, experience, or background of the other. This individual continually pointed out their colleague’s professional weaknesses. They set unclear expectations around work assignments and didn’t trust their teammate to make decisions. Not once did they show any interest in them as a person. And they blamed their coworker when the product launch was less than...

There’s the challenge of dealing with uncertainty, where you’re operating in the weird zone that you’re making decisions that have significant long term impact or that are difficult to reverse or course-correct in the face of great uncertainty. Uncertainty is often unnecessary in the sense that you could, in principle, reduce the uncertainty. You could go research the question more. You could obtain more information, or run an experiment. It’s not cosmic uncertainty, without absolute knowability. When there’s true, deep, un-mitigatable uncertainty then it’s not to hard to say, “we’re just going to choose something and make the best decision we can.” There’s a more frustrating uncertainty. When the uncertainty is not necessary. But the thing that’s limited is the cost in obtaining further information to reduce that uncertainty. And so you’re left in a dissatisfying situation in which I have to make a highly consequential decision with a lot of uncertainty. We could have...