Are Product Managers afraid to make a decision?

Do you know what made product management way more difficult than it needs to be: Fear of making a decision by the Product Manager! How to deal with indecision?

My line of work appears easy to me: I have my backlog with ideas, business needs, bugs, tech improvements, and user feedback and I prioritize it based on the value/effort chart, my goals, and the current business strategy.

No frameworks, fancy software, or external companies are required.

But how so? The Product Manager’s decision needs to be based on detailed research, reliable data, and a Discovery process.

But does it, really? I know that theory and textbooks will say otherwise, but this “investigation”, or rather discovery, type of approach is often overkill.

If you applied this complex and extensive process to every backlog item, not only would the ticket’s lifetime increase significantly, but also any initiative would be that much later live in the product.

Thus, you must realize that when selecting how much discovery you need to make an educated decision a few factors need to be considered before invoking all those time-consuming possibilities:

• Can we release some MVP within a sprint or two?
• Are we in a race with competitors?
• Has this been…