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Confidence and humility
Confidence that borders on arrogance has to sit beside serious humility. The confidence is what makes a PM certain the work is the right thing to do. It also makes it easy to give credit to the designer who made the last-second change or the engineer who stayed up all night, since PMs are going to get too much credit no matter what.
Process and ambiguity
The second pair is process and ambiguity: a checklist for everything, and comfort throwing it out and redoing it, almost to the point of despising authority. Process is not useless, even though it is trendy to say so. A candidate who can show both through stories stands out in an interview.
Long-term and urgency
The third pair is long-term thinking and urgency. Great PMs know how they want the world to look six months, a year, or two years out, and which building blocks have to land for the system to work. Day to day, their bias for action is borderline annoying, and they set the pace of the whole company, so when they wake up in the morning, the team wakes up.
Can confidence and humility really coexist?
Research on forecasting suggests they can. Philip Tetlock's Good Judgment Project, funded by the United States intelligence research agency IARPA, ran forecasting tournaments beginning in 2011. The top performers, whom he called superforecasters, committed to specific probabilities and then revised them in small steps as evidence arrived. They did well because they held firm views loosely.
Why do checklists help experts?
Atul Gawande's 2009 book The Checklist Manifesto describes how checklists catch steps that skilled people skip when they are busy. Peter Pronovost at Johns Hopkins developed a short checklist for inserting central intravenous lines. A 2006 study in the New England Journal of Medicine of intensive care units in Michigan found that the median rate of catheter-related bloodstream infections fell from 2.7 per 1,000 catheter days to zero within three months.
How do leaders weigh speed against being right?
In his 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos divided decisions into two kinds. Type 1 decisions are hard to reverse and deserve careful deliberation, while Type 2 decisions can be undone and should be made quickly. He wrote that most decisions should be made with around 70 percent of the information a person wishes they had. Amazon lists bias for action among its leadership principles.
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