The Importance of Asking “Why?”

I manage an internal data pipeline. Essentially the product is ensuring smooth content production for the company’s flagship product: technology skills content.

My primary users are employees of the company, so product management looks a little different. The folks entering the data and using the built-from-scratch interface are my main focus. But….and that’s a big BUT I also need to weigh business impact with stakeholders who are making strategic decisions.

I recently encountered an interesting situation. My product team had incorporated a feature months ago that another PM and myself assumed we could remove. We had iterated on the original functionality and had plans to deprecate it.

My product designer had the forethought to challenge our assumptions and questioned me when I added the deprecation to our committed OKRs. It was a fair challenge, and I took a bite at the proverbial cookie. I actually didn’t think the stakeholders would object to the idea of deprecating said functionality because a newer shiner thing was coming soon.

Boy was I wrong! And initially I was baffled as to why they didn’t want to remove it. However, I asked lots of “Why this?” and “What outcome are you looking for?” probing questions.

Eventually I discovered that the users were creating their own workflow with unintended usage of the existing functionality. This was fascinating to me because the users never said, “I wish I had x to support me in y”. (The y was forecasting budgets and resources for content production by the way.)

As a product manager there is a high degree of “fall on your face and fail” moments. But the important thing is to get back up and keep asking, “Why?”. Why didn’t that work?

Eventually you’ll get to the root cause. And you may find some interesting behavior from your user base that you didn’t even know was happening. “Why?” is a cool question. Ask it.