If there’s one big takeaway I’ve gotten from years of meditation training and silent retreats I’ve attended, it’s that we shouldn’t blindly trust our minds. Our minds only offer a subjective representation of reality, colored by emotions and past experiences. And when you go to work, you can’t really “leave your subjective mind behind”. The opinions you have and the choices you make are always somewhat based on gut. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The beauty of diversity is that people with different points of view and experiences come together and try to figure out what makes sense, it’s just that we should be more aware of our subjectivity when making strategic business decisions. 

I started thinking more deeply about this about five years ago when I was founding a new team at Spotify with a product lead and an engineering lead. Together, we were thinking about how to best set up our group for success, which came down to three things. Firstly, we wanted to make sure that all teams in our organization had clear goals informed by insights and our company strategy. Secondly, we wanted to ensure that those goals were measurable so that we could track how our work impacts the business. Lastly, we wanted to make sure that the teams had thought-through plans on how to go about trying to reach their goals. And that’s where we saw some opportunities for improvement, as what would frequently happen was this:

After a business goal was set, teams felt tempted to quickly jump into generating ideas on how to reach it. They then would often get excited about a particular idea that they wanted to build and ship as an A/B test, to see if it had the desired effect. But what we soon learned was that if you go from a goal directly to a single solution, and the solution doesn’t work, it’s really hard to backtrack why. Is it because you designed the solution in the wrong way? Or is the underlying hypothesis not correct? Or are you even solving the right problem? 

To avoid teams ending up in this state of feeling stuck, we started thinking about ways to challenge this mindset.

The Thoughtful Execution tree

To change the mindset of jumping too quickly into one solution, we realized that we should remind our teams of the necessary steps in a thoughtful product development process. And that presenting those steps in a tree structure would encourage them to follow the steps in order. We wanted to lead them to go wide in problem identification and hypothesis creation before zooming into a single solution. We named it the Thoughtful Execution tree.

It all starts with data and insights

If your friend complained that she feels lonely after moving to a new country, you’d probably feel tempted to suggest solutions to her problem. “Why don’t you join a book club since you’re so into reading?” you might say, while another person would recommend her to spend more time with her colleagues. But only through carefully examining your friend’s behavior would you identify the choices she makes that might lead to her feeling lonely. Maybe she works too much and doesn’t have enough time to make new friends. Or maybe the fact that she doesn’t speak the local language makes her shy away from social situations where she could meet new people. Only by understanding the problem space and addressing the root causes of why your friend is not making new friends can you give meaningful advice on how to hel