Which Color Shoes?
you can tell when it's a busy week because i will post product management *~*~thought leadership~*~* that i've had sitting drafted for 3 years
Amazon overall, and Bezos specifically, have a lot of silly phrases and thought technologies they use regarding business and how to do it, most of which I find fairly insufferable. But one I actually kinda like is the idea of one-way doors vs two-way doors. The idea is that when it comes to making decisions, it’s a natural inclination to always want to make sure you’re making the right decision, but you should remember that doing that does come with a cost (in time and effort, mostly.) And one heuristic they espouse is to think about whether this decision is a one-way door, ie. once you go through it you can’t turn back around, or a two-way door, ie. where you can. If it’s a one-way door, then yes by all means think carefully about it and put an appropriate amount of resources into making sure you aren’t making an irreversible mistake. But if it’s a two-way door, you should bias towards just making a decision and moving forward rather than bias towards making the right decision, because if it turns out you’re wrong you can always walk back through the door.
Sure! Nice little metaphor! And as a worrywart, I definitely suffer from decision paralysis, and so can benefit from these kinds of reminders.
But there’s one other similar heuristic for knowing when to think carefully about a decision and when to prioritize decisiveness: what color shoes should this character wear?
This I believe I heard from my at-the-time-favorite (now lightly cancelled) podcast host Chris Hardwick (lol) in the context of directing, where he learned from a director friend of his that a big part of the job is you just have to make a lot of decisions. Arguably that’s all directing is: making decisions about what other people should actually do. And he used the example of when a costume designer presents two options for which color shoes a character should wear. The director friend explained that in this case the costume designer is, yes, literally asking which color shoe, but they’re also asking can I move on to the next thing now? If you care deeply about the shoe choice, then by all means get deep into it, but if you don’t then your job is to decide quickly so they can get on with the rest of their busy job. It’s not exactly a two-way door, in that once you pick a shoe it may be hard to switch to the other one, especially once you start performances or filming. But it is low-stakes, and so worth considering that by fixating on making the “right” color choice you’re preventing other perhaps more important stuff from happening.
And in this case “I don’t care, whichever one you want” is the wrong answer. Again, they are asking in part to say “Let me move on” and it’s much easier to move on when the director is the one saying “this one is fine and I’m probably not going to ask you to change it, and if I do it’ll be because I changed my mind, not because you did anything wrong.”
Incidentally this did literally come up in the one play I directed in college, where for most characters the costumer just picked shoes (or worked with the actors on it) and presented it as “these are the shoes, unless you want something different”, but for one character it was a dead split between going with black shoes or white shoes.
I did not follow the Chris Hardwick advice, in that I then asked “what if we actually went with a mismatched pair?” which then we had to test.
But the broader point still stands!
But anyway this came up all the time as a product manager, because you are constantly asked to weigh in on requirements, discrepancies, bugs, conflicts etc. Much like a director, your job is not really to produce actual tangible artifacts, but rather to make decisions to enable the people who are doing that production (developers, designers, etc.) And some of these decisions are really important and you should think through them and take your time! Or some of them are things for which you have a strong opinion and can (and should) answer quickly and confidently!
But also a lot of them are things that are either reversible (the Amazon two-way door), are low-stakes, are truly equivalent, or that you don’t have an opinion on. Those are what I would call “which shoe color?” cases, and in that case your job is to make a decision as quickly as possible so people can get on with their jobs1.
In truly neutral cases, my specific flow was usually first to ask if the question asker had a preference, and if so go with that. If not, if there was any reason I couldn’t make the decision immediately, then I would say what that reason is (“I need to research X” or “I need to talk to Y” or even “I need a bit more time to think”) and give a timeline by when I could have an answer, and try to stick to that.
If I couldn’t come up with the specific thing I needed to do or timeline I could give, then that was my signal that this is really a shoe color question and I need to just make the decision immediately and let everyone move on.
There’s a lot of stuff I was not good at as a product manager, hence leaving that profession, but this was actually I think on of my comparative strengths, at least relative to some other PMs I worked with who agonized a lot more over minor decisions!