The Best Product Managers Optimize For Reversibility and Optionality

A Product Manager's Superpower: Worrying About the Right Things at the Right Time

Product Management books have made us believe that one day we’ll follow all the steps right and deliver a magnificent product. Most likely we won’t.

In a perfect world we build the right thing in the right way. As you presumably already know, we don’t live in a perfect world. The messy nature of reality makes us grumpy and jittery. We try to soothe our anxiety by chasing the illusion of control.

To make matters worse, we don’t even see the world clearly. Our understanding and observations of it are inherently flawed.

We try to make sense of scraps of reality with our biased and finite minds. We’re guessing at patterns and stumbling to make decisions. We’re swimming in noise while our brain continuously wrestles to uphold the illusion of control.

How can we best navigate the noise and uncertainty as Product Managers?

How can we make the best decisions that optimize our chances of building the right thing in the right way?

How do we make decisions as late as possible without shooting ourselves in the foot?

Welcome to the magnificent world of reversibility and optionality.

Optionality and Reversibility: Keeping the Option Open That You’re Wrong

We’re frequently wrong, even when people are confident that they are right.

A real-world example: companies add features nobody cares about or that don’t move the needle for the business. We often focus on the unnecessary while pretending it’s necessary.

The reason this happens is simple: when we’re faced with uncertainty, we try reason this uncertainty away. That’s about as useful as denying that the earth is round.

Turning inwards is frequently completely the wrong approach, especially when it relates to complex work.

Let’s illustrate this using an example many of us can relate to: choosing your education.

Choosing Your Education: Taking Into Account Reversibility and Optionality

“What do you want to study?”

I had no clue what I wanted to do or be. In Dutch high school, at some point you must pick a track (called Profiel in Dutch). Your selected Profiel determines what you can potentially study after graduation.

There were four academic tracks I could choose

1. Arts and Society - focused on culture

2. Economy and Society - business-focused

3. Nature and Health - STEM-light with Biology

4. Nature and Technology - STEM-heavy without Biology

I wasn’t great at math, chemistry or physics. I was decent enough that I ultimately opted for the STEM-heavy program. I also elected to do Economy and Biology.

This was a great choice for three reasons:

1. Reversibility

2. Optionality

Jeff Bezos talks about one-way or two-way door decisions:

1. One-way door decisions. Some decisions are so important and hard to reverse that they are one-way door decisions. You have to think long and hard and try to make the right decision.

2. Two-way door decisions. These are decisions that are easy to change and reverse. Don’t sweat these decisions too much, as you can easily change them later.

Nature and Technology (Option 4) combined with the Nature and Health electives, was the most reversible decision I could make. I could easily switch to any of the other three tracks, if I learned I didn’t like it or it was too difficult.

However, there is one other dimension which is rarely mentioned that is just as important: optionality.

You can make decisions that increase the number of options available to you: increased optionality. You can also make decisions that decrease the number of options available to you, decreased optionality.

I was clueless about what I wanted to study after finishing high school. I opted to delay the decision as much as possible. The STEM-heavy track meant I would keep as many options open as possible.

You can see reversibility as keeping doors open in case you want to move back and undo your choices. Optionality is about keeping future doors open. You try to preserve or sometimes even unlock more choices as you move forward.

This distinction between reversibility and optionality is crucial to understand.

Ideally, when making choices, you try to preserve reversibility and increase optionality as much as possible. I’ll illustrate why reversibility and optionality is crucial using a game of Poker.

The Importance of Reversibility and Optionality in Product Management

Product Management, like poker, is a game of imperfect information. When the game of Poker starts, and you receive two cards in your hand. You don’t know the cards the other plays have in their hands, nor do you know the subsequent cards that will be dealt.

Many Product Managers, try to make decisions based on the two cards they’re dealt. But the reality is that you simply lack information to make a good call. You need to wait till there are more cards on the table, see how the players are betting, so you can better assess what’s going on.

That’s why understanding reversibility and optionality is vital. If you know you’re in a situation where you have incomplete, imperfect and noisy information, it’s super crucial that you try to make decisions that are reversible and preserve optionality.

Let’s illustrate reversibility and optionality using a game of poker. Imagine you received your hand and immediately decide to go all-in. The flop, turn or river didn’t happen yet. Stated more simply: you have no clue what cards are going to be dealt.

Going all-in before any other cards are dealt is a non-reversible choice that leaves you with no further options during this game. You won’t benefit from any additional information that becomes available as the game progresses

You’re in the DANGER ZONE.

Now let’s make it more familiar by talking about real-world Product Management examples. Imagine you’re building a new product. The whole team wants to go for a micro-services architecture. They want be ready for the future and build something scalable.

Where would you categorize this decision? I would categorize it as low reversibility and low optionality. You’re entering the DANGER ZONE once again.

Going for a micro-services architecture significantly reduces the number of options available to you. Choosing for micro-services closes many future doors. You should only opt for it if absolutely necessary as it comes with a significant tax: the micro-service premium.

Going for a micro-services architecture is an example of a difficult to reverse decision that decreases optionality. Once you have a set of micro-services, it’s really difficult to go back to a monolith. You’re also committing to many other choices and engineering challenges you must solve by choosing a micro-services approach.

What should they be doing instead?

Why not start as a modular monolith where the modules only ‘talk’ to each other through interfaces? If it turns out a micro-services architecture is better suited, you can easily change it to a micro-services architecture later.

Going for a modular monolith is a good example of a reversible decision that increases optionality. You’re postponing important decisions as much as possible, to a later point of time when you have far better information.

The Seductive Pull of Uncertainty

You’re not as smart as you think.

Don’t commit to big decisions until there are enough cards on the table to warrant bold choices. Keep your boots firmly in the mud and rooted in reality.

Just like we don’t like crawling in the mud, we don’t like dancing with uncertainty. We prefer evading the mud of reality altogether, by trying to reason it away.

If you want to develop the best products, you must crawl in the mud while you preserve reversibility and optionality as much as possible. You’re going to get dirty, it will feel uncomfortable and icky. Sometimes it’ll even feel like you’re not making decisions and postponing.

But you’re like a lion, crawling through the mud, waiting for the opportune moment to pounce.

Jump too early, and your prey will be able to escape. If you jump too late, you’re also going to miss your prey.

Pouncing At The Last Responsible Moment

You’re aiming for the last responsible moment, as Mary and Tom Poppendieck define it:

“Concurrent development makes it possible to delay commitment until the last responsible moment, that is, the moment at which failing to make a decision eliminates an important alternative. If commitments are delayed beyond the last responsible moment, then decisions are made by default, which is generally not a good approach to making decisions.”

As a Product Manager, you must develop a keen sense of timing. Both pouncing too late and too early can result in terrible outcomes.

The problem is that pouncing too early feels like being careful, and that pouncing too late feels like being reckless. Both are extremely dangerous and result in terrible outcomes.

We mostly pounce too early, so try to be more reckless as a Product Manager. If you never pounce too late, you can be sure you’re always pouncing too early.

As a Product Manager, you must learn to worry about the right things at the right time.

For example, when building a new product, it is easy to worry about everything and get sucked into discussions on all the different options and considerations you are facing. When you try to solve all of them at the same time, you won’t.

You will become paralyzed from all the stuff you still have to figure out and end up in meeting hell.

Another problem is that you’ll be making all your decisions at a point in time when you have the worst understanding and the least information. What are the things we have to solve now and what are the things we can leave for our future selves to worry about?

Postponing may seem like you’re passing on the hot potato, but you are actually delaying the decision to a moment where you will have more knowledge and a better understanding.

Plus you simply can’t solve everything at once. Solutions that gradually emerge end up being better than solutions that try to aim for a hole-in-one — and fail.

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Emergent design is the enemy of premature optimization. The key thing is leaving your options open in a way that will not limit your options to optimize toward a great solution.

That’s what we should be thinking about.

The dream of a perfect architecture is the enemy of a good architecture. You’re not as smart as you think and your opinion doesn’t really matter. It’s reality that counts.

Keep crawling through the mud, however uncomfortable it may feel.

Until you’re ready to pounce a real gazelle instead of an imaginary one.