Decision Journaling Your
Way to Product Sense

​Dear Reader,​

I know, I know. You probably can't hear the term product sense anymore (welcome to the club). But I recently arrived at a non-thought-leader-y practical angle for cultivating it.

In a recent client workshop, the topic of product sense came up. How to cultivate it. How it influences decisions. And what

The main thing I arrived at with my reflections was that it's not per se a matter of the quantity of your work. You can work in product for 20+ years and have made 1,000+ decisions, but you never realized the results of the decisions; you haven't built up a sense that's useful for increasing the chances of your next decision succeeding.

But this doesn't mean only the "right" decisions you take help build up product. Like with many things in life, it's about quality.

Which requires understanding how your decisions have been working out. Which you can achieve through some version of a decision journal.

I won't try to repackage this existing template into a new fancy labeled artifact. Instead, I want to encourage you to apply the simple practice to your everyday work. If I were to strip it down, I would focus your decision journal on these aspects:

• The (business or customer) problem the decision is about
• The decision options and your choice
• The range of measurable outcomes you wanted to create
• Grading the results
• If you could turn back the time and take the decision again, would you do anything differently? If yes, what?

Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

Who is Tim Herbig?

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.