Check out [[Daily Reading]] for context. Took a break from my daily reading yesterday (December 26). Resuming again today from my dad's ancestral home in Thalassery, Kerala. ## Today's Picks of the Internet Today, we have pieces on **bold decision making** and **building trust in teams**. #### [How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets - Lessons from Slack's Chief Product Officer](https://review.firstround.com/how-to-take-bigger,-bolder-product-bets-lessons-from-slacks-chief-product-officer) Noah Desai Weiss is a product expert. He has been a part of Google's structured data team, scaled Foursquare from 3 million to 50 million users (and a revenue of $35 million), and being an integral part of several product decisions at Slack (I love Slack btw!) In this piece, he talks about bold decision-making, how he has imbibed that in his tenure at Slack and how the rest of us can use his framework to be better and braver decision makers. **Qualitative inputs over quantitative inputs for hard decision making** - Data and experimentation is quantitative i.e a numbers game. This works well for small problems that can be defined but not for harder problems that can't be defined. - In this case, qualitative or *intuition* based decision making offers greater value - Experimentation is definitely useful, but the timing matters. > Use intuition to know what the problem is, and why the proposed solution would help the users. Understand the impact of the change and if it is measurable or immeasurable. Then head over to run experiments. **A framework for quality decision-making, even when you have little resources and even little data** 1. Share context - Everybody involved or impacted by the decision needs to have alignment 2. Build trust - Share more, be more open to all kinds of feedback and ideas, work together 3. Factor in risk - One-way vs tow-way doors framework i.e is a decision easily reversible (two-way) or not (one-way). Spend time understanding one-way more than two-way decisions #### [How to Build Trust](https://jacobian.org/2023/nov/16/how-to-build-trust) Jacob Kaplan-Moss is the co-creator of [Django](https://www.djangoproject.com/), a web framework. Based on his professional achievements, its safe to say he might know a thing or two about managing people. In this article, Jacob dives into one aspect of management - **Trustbuilding**. **A Bulleted Summary** - To build trust, prove yourself to be *trustworthy* - Do your job well and lead by example - Be ready to accept situations where your best efforts don't cut it. If you are consistently unable to gain the trust of several members of your team, then its probably time to rethink if management is a career for you. - Behaviours that build trust - Be consistent with how you respond to similar situations - An erratic, unpredictable management style would cause your team to fear you more and trust you less - Be clear and transparent in your communication - Be reliable - Do what you say you will do. - Set and respect boundaries - Use your power rarely, but when you do, be straightforward - Basically, if you want that project report submitted by end of week, say this directly. Don't add the "Can you please ..." - Give lots of feedback - Mostly positive, 5:1 ratio of positive to negative feedback - Give credit, take blame - Pretty much how a good leader leads - Give away your toys - Delegate! - Sponsor and coach - Be a mentor to your team - Respect confidentiality - Do not indulge in office smalltalk or gossip where you have to reveal employee names. Same goes for complaints raised by employees. - Ask for permission to give feedback or suggestions --- #### Like what you see? Would you like to support me? Easy! Head over to [this link](https://refind.com/?invite=7b7e76f6e0) and subscribe to receive **Refind** newsletters. Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Loved by 400k curious minds.