Your Prototype Works. But Should Anyone Trust It? - Follow Up Story
How defining objectives and tradeoffs turns into a decision system
What happened after writing a recent Product Management IRL article? These insights are for paid subscribers to Product Management IRL.
This week’s backstory is about trusting automation:
What Prompted This Article?
This article started with an email from Tim Varelmann. He was offering a guest post on prototyping for product managers.
He also offered to give information on optimization strategies. That got my attention.
My product is being used in complex environments. I was looking forward to learning from Tim.
Tim’s story about working with a product team on a complex retail ordering system was one of those gritty stories that felt like a real situation from my product work.
Tim was brought in after a prototype planning tool wasn’t working right. He worked with the product team to define:
Objectives - what you are optimizing for
Constraints - naming where rules can bend
Tradeoffs - defining decision tension
He re-wrote the logic around objectives, constraints and tradeoffs.
And he did one more thing: he made the prototype show how the decision aligned with the objective.
With that change, the prototype could be tested and rolled out.
I don’t have the benefit of an operations research consultant in my product work. But I thought Tim’s approach to a complex situation would help.
