“1. Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.”
2. Distinguish proximate causes from root causes.
3. Recognize that knowing what someone (including you) is like will tell you what you can expect from them.”
– Ray Dalio
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“A proximate cause is an event which is closest to, or immediately responsible for causing, some observed result. This exists in contrast to a higher-level ultimate cause (or distal cause) which is usually thought of as the ‘real’ reason something occurred.” (related: 5 whys — “to determine the root cause of a defect or problem by repeating the question ‘Why?’) – Gabriel Weinberg
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When you’re faced with a problem, a good product manager will always ask “Why?” five times. Going through the “5 Whys” helps you understand the core symptom behind a problem, not just its surface consequences. Let’s say you get an angry email from a customer who is annoyed because they didn’t get a delivery until two hours after the close of their delivery window. You file the problem away in your brain: Problem: A customer is upset because their delivery was late.
A busy PM who is not following the “5 Whys” mental model would probably make a quick decision to do whatever it took to make the situation resolve itself quickly—give a refund, offer a future discount, etc. That would get the problem solved, but only until the same problem arises with another customer. A PM who is thinking about the future and knows the “5 Whys” model would go through a process of questioning to help identify the root problem: Problem: A customer is upset because their delivery was late.
Why? Because they didn’t know it was going to be late, so they wasted their hour-long break from work waiting for us.
Why? Because no email notification was ever triggered even when we recognized that their delivery was going to be late.
Why? Because our email notification system pulls transaction data to confirm orders. But it doesn’t pull information from our logistics stack to tell us if an order is going to be delayed.
Why? Because we’ve relied on drivers to tell customers when they believe they’re going to be late to a delivery.
Why? Because when we were smaller, this kind of compromise made sense. Building out this notification system was generally less expensive than dealing with manual notifications.
This kind of questioning is powerful. It takes us from a surface problem that we can make go away quickly (with no learnings) to one that reveals a deeper, systematic, scaling issue—one that will recur unless changes are made.
– Hiten Shah
Source:
Ray Dalio’s Book Principles via http://amzn.to/2zx380n
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Gabriel Weinberg’s Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful via https://medium.com/@yegg/mental-models-i-find-repeatedly-useful-936f1cc405d
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Hiten Shah’s 3 Mental Models Every PM Needs to Make Decisions
https://amplitude.com/blog/2017/11/09/mental-models-help-pm-make-decisions
