To avoid bias and misalignment, collaboratively create a weighted decision-making rubric with stakeholders *before* evaluating options. This ensures everyone agrees on the evaluation criteria, making the final decision easier to accept and implement.
When presenting a recommendation to executives, lead with your conclusion on the very first slide. This 'answer first' approach respects their limited time and attention. You can then use the rest of the presentation to succinctly explain how you arrived at that decision.
Tying a PM's success to getting their project approved creates perverse incentives. Instead, frame discovery as a team effort to find the right opportunities. This encourages rigorous, unbiased investigation and celebrates killing bad ideas, not just launching new ones.
Don't fall into the trap of believing a scored rubric provides an objective, mathematical truth. Its primary value is forcing alignment on what criteria matter and ensuring a consistent data-gathering process, not spitting out an infallible answer.
Stated intentions are unreliable due to the 'say-do gap'. To truly test an assumption, ask for a small but meaningful commitment. This could be a beta sign-up, an email address, or even a direct request to a partner for data. This observes behavior, providing stronger evidence.
Condense pages of research into simple visuals like a color-coded rubric summary or a hypothesis validation table. Showing raw data overwhelms stakeholders and invites unproductive questions about minor details, shifting focus from the outcome to your outputs.
A standardized decision rubric is ineffective if teams interpret its scores differently (e.g., a '5' means $3M to one PM and $500k to another). To prevent this, have product managers meet regularly to align on how they apply the rubric's criteria and scoring.
During discovery, your job is to be a skeptic and find reasons an idea will fail. However, once you reach a reasonable confidence level (e.g., 60-70%) and make the call, you must pivot. Your role becomes cheerleading the decision to motivate the team and drive progress forward.
Don't make high-stakes decisions in a silo. Involve stakeholders throughout the discovery and analysis process. Having finance review your P&L or sales weigh in on customer pain builds shared context and turns your recommendation from 'your bet' into 'our bet.'