Would a Product Manager remove the arrow first?

Product management is a balancing act. Every step of the way in your product management career you’re faced with a decision — to go forward with existing know-how and risk taking a decision OR to dwell deeper and get more information to take a better decision, at the cost of taking the decision right away. Today, we’ll discuss the virtues of acting now and building an appetite for risk.

The story of ‘Remove the Arrow First’

An old fable I read spoke of a story of a bunch of kids playing in a forest in rural India. One of them hit a ball into a tree. A split second later, a bird fell with an arrow pierced. The kids ran towards the bird, scared of having killed it. Chatters began — “This is your fault!”, “Impossible! It must be your father, the hunter, who shot at the bird”, “You hit the ball, it must’ve hit the bird into an arrow!”… only one kid went ahead and removed the arrow, leading to the famous (or not-so-famous) moral of “Remove the arrow first”. The moral is elaborated as the virtue of acting now, and this story has been passed around in many business training classrooms.

The Reality of Removing the Arrow

Taking the story literally, an unfortunate outcome of removing the arrow is that the bird dies. (Remember kids, never remove an object impaled in your body — it might be the only thing keeping you alive! Splinters are fine but anything deeper than a few millimeters requires professional intervention). There is a risk associated with taking decisions surrounding areas that are not your areas of expertise — which can have fatal outcomes. Note that no great surgeon has had a perfect record — a handful have had to die for that surgeon to save remaining hundreds!

Product managers view of removing the arrow

If a product manager were involved in this situation, she’d face the following choices (having already established that standing around doing nothing or worse blaming did not help the situation)—

1. Act now
2. Gather more information and then act (Act Soon)
3. Pass-on decision to a more competent authority ( Delegate Action)

Decision Matrix for Action — Red is risk. There is always a risk!

Depending upon her previous experience, she’d either:

1. Act right away — knowing the location of the wound, the many previous experiences she’d had in removing arrows from birds and her first-aid training. She’d still run the risk of losing the bird, but that’s something she’d be confident in taking.
2. Act Soon — having seen vets perform a similar action, she’d analyze the location, see the state of the bird and if the bird is not in any immediate danger, apply basic first-aid to prolong the birds life, and then look around for any vets roaming the forest area to take further action. The risk here would be larger, but something she’d be willing to take.
3. Delegate action — ask calmly and loudly if anyone else has ever dealt with a situation similar to this and pass on the authority to that person. Observe and aid in whatever she can, so that in the future, she has a reference built for such situations. Risk is really high here, since the bird could potentially die, even though it’s not her call to make anymore.
4. In an event that delegation is not possible, she would take some action right away, knowing that not taking an action is worse than taking a very risky action.

Her decision taking abilities would be based off the kind of organization she is/was in and the kind of authority she enjoyed. The more authority and risk appetite she enjoyed in her career, the more confidence she has in her decisions.

Honestly, at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter if the bird survived. What mattered was how the PM took it — did she take it as a positive reinforcement of her abilities to take a decision and learn from it? or did she become risk-averse?

In conclusion —

• Bad product managers focus on the optics of the situation and stand around doing nothing or going into analysis-paralysis. They spend too long looking at the arrow and bird, search for who shot the arrow and join the crowd.
• Good product managers Act Soon — always keeping in mind the cost of inaction. They take quick decisions — accepting the risks of removing or keeping the arrow, and more importantly, accepting the limitation of their knowledge of arrows, and bird biology and their sharp overlap.
• Great product managers look back on their decisions and ask, ‘Knowing what I know now, could I have acted differently? Knowing what I know now, should I have kept the arrow or removed it?’ They prepare for the next occurance of the bird-arrow event and reorganize their mental decision framework.

Consumers view of removing the arrow

Incidentally, most of us tend to forget what the bird wants, a mistake done by many a large organizations. The bird doesn’t care about who shot the arrow at it, all that it cares about is the removal of pain! It doesn’t even care about the long term repercussions of a hasty decision taken by the kid — instinctively it is designed to demand a resolution of the immediate pain at hand.

A cynical insight from this is that consumers don’t care about the long term, while you as a business are focused on the long term. They need immediate resolution of their issues.

Before any decision is taken, one must prioritize the list of issues at hand, with the focus on the end-user.

It goes without saying, that this article is written within the limits of my knowledge and experience. There are always viewpoints I haven’t addressed; viewpoints I’d love to know in the comments. Please do take the time to write about it. Thanks!

If you like the kind of articles I’m churning out, do follow. Also, check out https://productcoalition.com/ for more articles about product management. Excellent viewpoints expressed by a large coalition of product managers across the globe.

As always, thank you for reading. Remember to ‘Shoot the PM’. :)