It can be overwhelming — debilitating, even — to have to choose among a plethora of options. Psychologist Barry Schwartz described this as “the paradox of choice” in reference to consumer behavior.
This paradox of choice afflicts us in product engineering, too. There’s a million things we could do. How do we decide what we should do?
Fortunately, Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote a helpful piece about decision-making. Kaplan-Moss describes a process in which you first decide how to decide when you need to decide. What resonates about this approach is that it’s not only tailored to each situation, but also aligns the stakeholders and potential decision-makers in advance.
It’s a great framework, but doesn’t answer the question of how we decide what we should build. Common approaches are to either stack rank your options, or to start by eliminating the less-great ones. Both of these approaches are oriented towards articulating the virtues of each option (and then either choosing the one at the top, or eliminating a bunch at the bottom & iterating).
Ryan Singer (of Shape Up) suggests flipping the script. His approach is to reason about the downsides of not choosing an option. What is the customer doing, instead? What’s so bad about that? By approaching the problem from the bottom-up, you’re no longer asking “What’s the value of building this?” but rather “What’s the impact to our customers if we don’t?”
Hopefully you’ll find a plethora - 1 number of options that you can eliminate. And if not, ask yourself of the remaining options, “How are we going to decide how to decide?”