1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
🛠️ How Product Teams Use Decision Trees to Make Better Choices
Four Decision Tree Frameworks Product Managers Need to Know​Dear Reader,​ As a highly visual thinker, decision trees are one of my favorite ways to support product teams in making real progress and bringing structure to my thinking. Today, I want to share four of my favorite tree structures and use an outside-in view on Eventbrite to illustrate their usage. MECE TreesThe MECE tree structure, invented by legendary McKinsey consultant Barbara Minto, helps product teams break down problems into non-overlapping (Mutually Exclusive) and comprehensive categories (Collectively Exhausting). For example, when Eventbrite’s event creator success tanks, they might separate barriers into platform usage, business success, and support—ensuring no overlap and gaps in their analysis. Metrics Trees​Metrics Trees evolve MECE thinking into trackable metrics, progressing from lagging to leading indicators as you move down the tree. If you have the data, metrics trees can be set up in an algorithmic way. But even if you lack quantitative insights, creating a narrative-driven metrics tree will help you uncover measurement gaps. And while MECE is an excellent ambition for your metrics trees, don’t stress about it. Sometimes, a lower-level metric will link to more than one metric–and that’s ok. At Eventbrite, the tree might start with a lagging metric like quarterly creator revenue, break down into ticket sales performance, and further branch into leading indicators like event creation completion rates that predict future success. Opportunity Solution Trees​Opportunity Solution Trees bridge metrics and solutions. While Metrics Trees tell you what to measure, OSTs guide you on what to build. At Eventbrite, this means connecting creator success metrics to concrete opportunities (like simplifying event creation) and potential solutions (such as intelligent templates). Impact MapsSimilar to OSTs, Impact Maps help teams navigate the connection of problem and solution spaces by connecting high-level business goals to specific solutions and experiments–Highlighting where teams lack evidence to make decisions. Starting with a clear goal (increase creator success by 25%), Eventbrite’s product team might identify key actors (first-time vs. recurring creators), identify needed behavior changes through research, and outline solutions to test. If you have ever benefited from my content, I'd appreciate it if you would share​ this newsletter on LinkedIn. It truly helps. Thank you for Practicing Product, ​Tim​ Join my In-Person Workshops in BerlinI'm excited to bring my beloved in-person workshops back to Berlin in January 2025. You can choose between 1-day workshops on Product Strategy, Product OKRs, or Product Discovery OR get the full 3-day experience for you or your team.
(reach out for custom team quotes) As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions. I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery. |
Product Practice Newsletter
1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com
Product Practice #429 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Oct 11, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Meet Me Next Week at Just Product 2026 Get your Ticket Dear Reader, When a leadership team wants to introduce OKRs, it can be tempting to start by turning every bullet point of your strategy into an OKR. But a long list of priorities will still compete for the same time and attention, even when it gets repackaged. Before moving into OKR drafting, I like to work through this...
Product Practice #428 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Oct 5, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Sorry for the slip in sending this one out on Friday. To make up for it, there will be (for the first time ever) two newsletters going out this week. Recently, a CPO told me about an engineer who had used AI to develop a proposal. But when the decisions in it were questioned, the engineer kept referring him back to the output. The CPO wondered how that conversation...
Product Practice #427 Your Strategy names one audience; weak evidence describes another PUBLISHED Sep 24, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, One of the most common questions that came up in my recent Strategy to Execution workshop at the ProductLab conference revolved around intentional strategic audiences vs. reactive chasing of new business. Many teams either operate where the company focuses on all customers of a given market (i.e., "all lawyers") or throw a wishful-thinking segment out...