It’s challenging to create a truly immutable decision-making framework, especially in dynamic environments with conflicting priorities. However, you can create a robust and adaptable framework that provides consistent guidance while allowing for flexibility when needed.
Here’s a possible approach if you are managing two conflicting departments dependent on each other’s productivity (eg, CPTO role):
1. Establish Clear Objectives and Metrics
- Define overarching goals that both departments contribute to. This fosters a sense of common purpose and encourages collaboration.
- Establish clear, measurable metrics for each department that align with the shared goals. This ensures accountability and clarifies expectations.
- Identify metrics that reflect the interdependency between the departments. This could be on-time delivery, project completion rate or shared resource utilisation.
2. Create a Decision-Making Process
- Establish a regular meeting or communication channel where both departments can discuss issues, share updates and make joint decisions.
- Encourage the use of data and objective analysis to inform decisions, reducing emotional bias and promoting fairness.
- Define clear escalation paths for resolving disagreements, ensuring that conflicts are addressed promptly and effectively.
3. Foster a Culture of Collaboration
- Align reward systems and incentives to promote collaborative behaviour and recognise joint achievements.
- Encourage open and transparent communication between departments, fostering trust and understanding.
- Provide training on conflict resolution techniques to equip employees with the skills to manage disagreements constructively.
4. Periodic Review and Adaptation
- Conduct periodic reviews of the framework’s effectiveness, soliciting feedback from both departments.
- Be prepared to adapt the framework as needed to accommodate changes in business objectives, organisational structure or external factors.
Practical Application: Engineering & Product Development
As a CPTO, you are leading both Engineering and Product Development teams. Product Development designs new features and products, while Engineering builds and implements them.
- Shared Goal: Successfully launch innovative, high-quality products that meet market needs and achieve business objectives (eg, increased revenue, user growth).
- Individual Metrics:
- Product Development: Number of features designed, user stories defined, prototypes created.
- Engineering: Velocity (features delivered per sprint), code quality, system uptime, bug resolution rate.
- Interdependency Metric: Number of features successfully launched and deployed without major bugs or delays.
- Decision-Making Process:
- Weekly joint meetings to review product specifications, discuss technical feasibility, estimate development time and identify potential roadblocks.
- Decisions are driven by data on development capacity, technical constraints, user feedback from previous releases and market research.
- A clear escalation path is defined for resolving disagreements, involving a technical lead and a product manager.
Scenario:
Product Development proposes a complex new feature with a tight deadline. Engineering raises concerns about feasibility and potential impact on system stability.
- Framework in Action: In the joint meeting, both teams present data: Product Development shows market demand and potential revenue impact, while Engineering presents data on current workload, technical challenges and estimated development time.
- Outcome: Through collaborative discussion, they might decide to adjust the scope of the feature, extend the deadline or allocate additional resources to ensure successful implementation.
As you can see, this framework fosters a collaborative environment where Engineering and Product Development work together effectively to achieve shared goals. It encourages data-driven decision-making, clear communication and proactive problem-solving.
It is a kind of decision-making framework commonly utilised by Chief Product & Technology Officers but can be adjusted and applied to any intersection.
