Ravi Mehta on how early-stage teams should make product calls with limited data. He pushes for a disagree and commit culture where people are heard before a decision owner decides, then you review what happened. With small teams, informed conviction beats waiting for statistical significance.
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Um, as an early stage marketplace where the team size is basically the founder with like industry knowledge, an engineer and an operations person, like how do you approach that PM like decision-making process when there might be, there's definitely not gonna be consensus on what to focus on?
Yeah. Absolutely. I think a couple things can help. One is having a culture around disagree and commit. So it's really important to surface everyone's perspective because that's going to make any decision that you come to a better decision. But it's also equally important to identify who's going to be the person that makes that decision and then for everyone to commit to making that decision as successful as possible. And a key part of disagree and commit that doesn't get talked about a lot is what's really important about creating a disagree and commit culture is not the disagree and committing. It's actually following up a month later or 2 months later when you have some data and you could say, we looked at this decision, it turned out to be right. And so we're happy that everyone committed to it. We're going to continue to double down on it. Or, you know, we took this decision, there was a lot of disagreement. Turns out it was the wrong decision. Here's all the reasons why we're going to make another decision. And the people who disagreed might feel vindicated and might feel like, wow, this is a place I really want to continue to contribute to. Because it's not the case that people want to be in control and always making every decision. It is the case that people want to be heard. And so if you can create a disagree and commit culture where people feel like they're heard, that's really important. Then the other thing I think is also important is shifting the mindset. I think at large companies that have a lot of data, people get into the mode of everything has to be statistically significant. Like we're not going to make a decision if we don't have statistically significant data. And that's flawed in a lot of ways, in part because the confidence interval for statistical significance is 95%. So you're wrong 1 out of 20 times, which is not a not an incredible hit rate anyway. And so I think especially for early stage founders who don't have as much data to work with, instead of talking about statistical significance, talk about informed conviction. Where have we gotten enough data points that we have conviction and we're informed by those data points? And now we've got enough conviction to move forward. You're always gonna get more data points. There's always gonna be more data to find. You don't need to get it all. You don't need to get to a 95% confidence interval. You just need to get to a point where you are informed and you have conviction and you're ready to commit to a particular direction.
