Frame your decision problem clearly and concisely to get to the heart of the issue you're trying to solve (e.g. how to cut $500k from a $1M budget).
Specify objectives upfront to guide your decision-making process and allow you to evaluate alternatives. Objectives can help justify your choices.
Generate creative alternatives and learn from past experience and data on what has worked. Evaluate based on how well alternatives satisfy your objectives.
Consider consequences and tradeoffs between alternatives to see how well each meets your various objectives. Rank options.
Address uncertainties, risk tolerance, and linked future decisions. Balance data and deliberation with instinct and experience. Make informed not just gut decisions.
(00:00) I'm really excited to bring our next speaker to the stage she was actually on the docket for last year and I was like I was I was supposed to be able to introduce her last year and then she ended up not being able to to make the conference and I was like oh my gosh I'm so excited that like I get to introduce her this year um and so I also get to fangirl again because she has been um she has lent her talents to many places including places like Vonage PayPal and Major League hacking and she's now the
(00:33) senior director of developer relations for emea at twilio and she will likely beat you at any quiz game related to film or TV and I want to make very clear that she makes very clear that that is a direct Challenge and so please take her up on it because I think we could all have a really good time with that and maybe we could take some bets you know and we could like all stand around the ping pong table and then just like start throwing out like trivia about TV and and film and and we'll see what happens
(01:05) um with that is my great joy after Much Ado to introduce our next speaker here to talk about more and Less near sini kukiasa yes thank you Rebecca and thank you for also giving me promotion I'm not senior director of developer relations just director but thank you I will let my supervisors know how much you value me um hello everyone uh so excited uh to be here as Rebecca said my name is murcini my pronouns are she her I currently work for the t-shirt company twilio supporting our evangelists in in me and
(01:48) we're also super happy to be able to support uh devil Khan this year um the um thing that I wanted to start with is just to say that I've been in Devil for quite a few years now about nine or ten and I have been award fortunate to have worn many different hats one of them being budget owner manager uh call it what you like which brings me straight to the topic of today's talk first can I see a show of hands if you've managed a budget for your team now if you've managed a budget for your team before okay so a few people here so
(02:23) why this topic why now with all of the uncertainty around in the economy and then in stability a lot of businesses are trying whatever they can to cut down on costs therefore a lot of budgets are being restricted and of course as we know several teams vary in departments which means that that influences where our budgets come from and what are what our values are and what our objectives are as well so instead of getting into the granularity of what activities you should be funding from your budget if that gets cut we're going to look at a
(02:58) framework that you can use no matter what your circumstances are a guide if you'd like to help you make the best decision possible on how to make more with less because if it's a time where you need to make an informed smart decision when the potential quality of your output or even your entire devil program is at risk this is the time so we will look at today our situation we will set the scene and then we'll jump straight into a decision-making framework and work through it with an example to figure out what you can do
(03:36) and what decisions you can make and how to make decisions if your budget does get cut okay um oh no what now you've been given the news your budget has been cut or if you've been managing over budgets for a while oh no not again it's not an uncommon thing to happen it's probably happened to myself all of the budgets I've managing the last 10 years for sure and you're probably depending on your team size getting everyone together start coming up with options Alternatives what should we be doing if
(04:10) you're solo devil you're doing it on your own um and are you thinking to Going Back to Basics there's a really good talk from Ben Greenberg he's been here hello from Deborah con Prague on going back to your team's Origins are you contemplating taking a risk and experimenting like we sometimes do in devrel is there a time for it probably not are you as a friend said when I was discussing this topic with them pivoting to activities that only or more closely show how you impact the bottom line
(04:44) making friends that can vouch for your close to profit centers as possible regardless of which org you sit in but that's this thing here which organization you sit in uh matters and your team's Mission matters now and in the long term as well are you focused on education Community contribution sign ups what are you measuring hoping you all have your objectives and metrics in place I'm assuming you do for the purposes of the talk and some teams do measure self-service Revenue some teams do help sales through
(05:17) the life cycle and on top of all of those dilemmas as some of us may have often experienced devil gets pulled in many different directions you have multiple stakeholders their expectations to be managed with all these different groups of people and especially upwards in your management chain be clear from the start that you won't be able to deliver what you had originally set out to do if you give us less we'll do less but this is a time where you need to start thinking how you'll get it right and how you can
(05:48) try and do what matters there is a complexity in appeasing stakeholders with less budget while figuring out to keep how to keep activities and objectives that are important and this is the pivoting part of the problem in question here options may seem endless and hard to navigate but basically what it comes down to is what decision you'll make and I do recognize here that sometimes you don't have a say at all people will just tell you what gets cut and what you can keep but if you have the opportunity to
(06:17) present and support your case on what you can keep and what gets cut it's worth exploring how you can make the best decision possible and it's at times like this that the necessity and speed in which we need to make decisions often leads us to making bad decisions and all this pressure can be very negative in concerns astray and this is the time where you need to refocus on what's important you need to be making decisions based on your objectives and not because of pressure and this thought about how we make
(06:48) decisions led me to doing some research on decision making Frameworks some of you may already be using some techniques anything from like a simple pros and cons list to a cosplay definition analysis to something more complex next slide there we go so as I was researching I stumbled Upon This Book value focused thinking a creative a path to creative decision making published in the early 90s I know a bit of a long time ago from Ralph keaney who's a professor and decision making consultant Kinney talks about how we usually default to
(07:28) Alternative focused thinking figure out what the options are then deciding what works and what he proposes his value focused thinking figure out what's important what you value and then figure out how to get it something that might sound like common sense but yet not a way of thinking were traditionally trained on he says we're putting value at the center of decision making it makes it easier for you to rank Alternatives generate new ones figure out how to please all the stakeholders we talked about before because you can
(07:58) validate why your choices are important and all of the other things that you see in the diagram taking it a step further a few years later Kenny this time with co-authors took the theory of value-focused thinking to a more practical level let's say basically bridging what researchers say we should be doing what people actually go and do and what is introduced in this book smart choices is a step-by-step guide a list of elements you can use to make decisions and avoid those non-optimal Rush decisions that we
(08:30) talked about before and this is of course the framework we will look at today it is called proact coming from the first letters of the five basic elements and then there are three special elements has anyone heard of this framework no one not even one person okay something new for everyone today um so let's see what all the different parts are the problem itself um and um how you frame it how you define it your objectives how you specify them Alternatives how do you evaluate them how do you create new ones consequences
(09:07) what do you sacrifice when you make a choice sorry that's trade-offs uh consequences the consequence of your decisions and then Traders are the sacrifices you make when you make a decision and then the three special elements uncertainty are there scenarios that might play out How likely are these scenarios to happen risk tolerance how much of a risk taker are you with your choices and Link decisions a decision you make now will influence one or more in the future and these special elements are still important especially in evolving
(09:39) environments like the uncertainty that we talked about at the start in order for us to work through the framework I'd like us to use an example and disclaimer any resemblers to real people teams companies purely coincidental this is all made up but let's get to know this Global devil team they essentially focus on Outreach they're in a let's say medium-sized company their head count is between 15 to 20 people their customer is a developer with decision making Authority their goal is to market the API to developers that's
(10:15) why they focus on Outreach they sit within marketing making the CMO their budget owner their budget spend is 1 million but now they've been told to cut this by half which is our problem here they focus on Outreach so they do events workshops content and their objectives are centered are an awareness and sign ups so as we mentioned there are many examples of several teams so what I'd like to ask you to do is imagine your team as we go through the exercise trying to figure what matters to you what your objectives are and trying to
(10:49) tailor to your circumstances okay to Jumping right into the framework the first step to making a good decision is to work on the right decision problem the way you frame your decision problem drives everything else in the decision making process and what it comes down to is essentially how you phrase your decision problem you can go more open or you can go more closed in the phrasing but the closer you get to the phrasing the closer you'll get to solving the problem so in our case and thinking of our example devil team I've written down
(11:23) the same issue in two different ways the first one how can we reevaluate our activities to save budget the essence is there but it's a bit generic to stairs to the right direction right so if we look at the second phrasing that's more closed how can we cut five hundred thousand dollars out of our budget again maximum return on investment from activities we keep this gives us a more concise problem to solve we know exactly how much money we need to save and we know that the activities we deep need to
(11:54) matter should we go with that it's in a couple of nods okay I'll take that thank you the phrasing is so important everything else in the decision making process hangs on to this next step on your friend the decision problem it's time to specify or evaluate your objectives why is this important because your objectives will form the basis for evaluating your Alternatives they basically become your decision criteria and in addition to making sure your decision gets to you where you want to go the objectives also guide you
(12:25) throughout the process they help you determine what information you need they help you justify your decision to others and they help you determine a decision's importance let's go through our hypothetical team's objectives increase platform sign ups by 20 year on year reach 50 000 developers increase awareness and use of a specific product focus on Central and East European countries and increase blog views by 20 50 year on year not saying these are right or wrong this would be a topic for a whole other talk but this is
(12:59) our example here so how can these objectives determine what information we need let's take the sign ups goal we need to check from historical data which activities have given us more signups can we still do 20 year on year maybe we can but as we said we can also adapt the objectives at this point if they don't if they no longer work for us secondly justify your decisions to others one good example could be you know a sales team a sales leader comes to you and says let's do this very costly activity in this completely
(13:29) different region you can say thank you now Point them to your objectives we have a direct ask from our leadership to focus on Ce maybe when we had one million budget we could be doing that but we now have to be careful with our resourcing and then finally determine the decisions importance huge point to be made here that this objectives will help us evaluate Alternatives because if the Alternatives don't satisfy objectives will basically won't be able to meet them and in order to make a decision you need
(14:02) to have alternatives to the alternatives to decide upon you want to have a wide range to choose from so don't let me to yourself get creative this can be Alternatives you already have or who says you can't come up with new ones however you want all your alternatives to be good ones because the decision you make can only be as good as your best alternative and to make sure you get quality Alternatives you can ask yourself how about each of your objectives create them first evaluate them after challenge constraints learn
(14:33) from your experience and then finally ask others for suggestions so if we go ahead and ask these questions for one of our objectives choosing the first one that was increasing sign ups 20 year and year how was the first question probably here you need activities that have a Hands-On element that require people to sign up for your platform start thinking without evaluating write your Alternatives down workshops online on in person hackathons online on in person what are some constraints budget and resources Hands-On activities require
(15:09) more Prem time learn from your experience was the other part look at what activities historically have yielded more sign ups and go with that and then the final part was ask other for suggestions again here maybe your field marketing team is sponsor an event and there's a developer audience there they've invited you to do a Hands-On activity at the booth great pay for it and we'll be there and you satisfy your your objectives throughout as well and then finally once you're happy with the amount of objectives free of
(15:46) presumptions evaluate them let's say we're happy with the ones we have here and just another thing to consider with sign ups there's going to be other parts depending on your objective that you need to consider is quality a Target or do you just want numbers if quality is a target going with an alternative that might be a hackathon with a partner partner might heal more quality signups if it's volume you're after like a CTA in your blog post or documentation would do and the guidance here is that you do
(16:16) this exercise for all of your alternatives and then for all of your objectives or in come up with Alternatives then look at the commonalities between these Alternatives and figure out which work but just for the interest of time we'll just do the signups one here before we move on let's remember our example team and the activities they do let's assume before the budget cut they did 50 50 events and content they might now have to Pivot and say we'll do 70 content 30 events with the budget cut you might say why not do a hundred
(16:50) percent content and save one more budget because at events you get human interactions you build community and because your budget owner slash CMO said you still need to do events and considering the breadth of events out there and the difficulty in tracking their Roi sometimes or all of the time choosing which ones to do and which to drop can be hard so we will focus on events for the rest of the exercise and just put aside the content goal for now understanding the consequences how well do your Alternatives satisfy your
(17:24) objectives assessing the consequences for each objective frankly will help you choose and identify the ones that meet your objectives all of your objectives and a bear call it fun I did put in the first slide that I'm a nerd a fun exercise you can do here to clarify to give you Clarity and clarify the scene is a consequences table for Imaginary devil team we've taken third-party events as the example and we've put them against each other against each objective to see how they match up with that objective plus an extra sneaky
(18:00) thing I added in here which is costs which of course it is prudent to look at that now so in the First Column we have the objectives and how they relate to the third party event so signups what activity can we do at the event can we have a booth I'm going to run activity there can we do a talk or a workshop even better the reach remember the 50 000 developers what's the size of the event this is a bit more straightforward the specific product we wanted to push can we do a demo the location again a bit more straightforward was C and then
(18:32) finally the cost so if we wanted to choose one event from here how do we pick which one is winning if we had to go with on one it's clear or close to clear how each event matches against each objective but we've not put the events against each other yet which brings me to the final step of the main elements of the framework many times objectives will conflict with each other and as a result you will have to evaluate trade-offs between the objectives so sacrificing something from one objective to gain something from
(19:04) another so for example going back to the consequences table event B is a thousand people so that's a good size to help with reach but it's in France so it doesn't satisfy our location priority and in order to properly consider training Buffs you need to rank all the Alternatives against each objective and this can be used with a ranking table I know another table but it is the same as the consequences one but we've just removed the content from it and basically did a ranking of one to five for each objective for our events it is
(19:39) okay to have ties by the way so I think even A and B we could do a demo for a product push so it's okay for them to tie at number three so if you add the totals here to figure out which alternative satisfies all of your objectives the most in our case will be D with eight and remember we said we might need to make some sacrifices as it's rare you'll have one alternative so one event that will be ranked number one across all objectives here if we say that synapse is the most important objective for us an event d
(20:11) rank first that's another reason to go with it other than um the total and remember the event they rank first because we could do a workshop we could do a talk we could do loads of activities that could yield signups and now some of the other totals are very close here is where you can use a bit of your experience and say hey I know even d one technically but we've done event e for like the past 10 years and it's an amazing event let's go with that so you're using a mix of experience Instinct and sort of like a gut decision
(20:41) here which we will talk about the notion of a gut decision at the end of the talk as well and come into the final part the elements that help us make decisions in evolving environments clarifying uncertainties what could happen in the future How likely is it that it will think about your risk tolerance tolerance when decisions involve uncertainties the desired outcome might not be the outcome you were pursuing how willing are you to risk that and considering link decisions what you decide today should be informed from
(21:16) your goals of the future and what you want to do in the future should inform your decision today especially in an uncertain landscape like ours but let's look at some examples so we can understand these elements as well uncertainty makes choosing difficult but effective decision making essentially means you need to confront uncertainty and then judge the likelihood of different outcomes and their possible impacts and in order to examine uncertainty you can do a risk profile it's basically an evaluation of your
(21:48) ability to take risks and you can do that by asking yourself these questions what are the cake uncertainties what are the possible outcomes of these uncertainties what are the chances of occurrence of which possible outcome and what are the consequences of each outcome so again if we think of third-party events as our example for a team what are the uncertainties economic geopolitical instability in the region we're looking at inflation covet related issues that we've all faced in the last couple of years what are possible
(22:17) outcomes of these uncertainties the event getting canceled completely having less attendees at the event hidden costs Staffing what are the chances of occurrence of these possibility it is a cancellation of the whole event less likely less than 10 is more likely and then what are the consequences of these outcomes not meeting your objectives because you had that reach objective and the less people at the event bad return on investment and then finally if something goes horribly horribly wrong damage to company reputation but had to
(22:50) put the really bad one there um in the in this step talking about risk it's important to determine how willing you are to risk getting a less favorable outcome in pursuit of a better consequence as he said and to do that you can think about the desirability of each consequence balance a desirability with their chances of occurring and choose the most attractive alternative so again here for example team we have the consequences of our uncertainties for sponsoring these events not meeting objectives bad return investment and
(23:26) damage to company reputation and we've added a ranking for essentially which one is the worst to happen and then their chances of occurring not meeting objectives not the worst thing that could happen so ranking it number one but somewhat likely bad return on investment less desirable because if you remember our problem statement we wanted good RI from the activities we kept however but Roi is quite like possible of occurring in this current climate with the uh with the economy and finally damaged company reputation
(24:00) definitely the worst thing that could happen but also not so likely maybe there's an event that you know you'll get good metrics good results from but you know the organizers are doing some like dodgy stuff do you want to risk your company reputation and go for it there's probably also like ethics involved here and then the final element link decisions the decisions you make today will influence the decisions you make in the future there are three basic steps here I won't go through them in detail
(24:28) just for the interest of time and also just to say in John's talk before he mentioned how AWS was sponsoring the events then they pulled out and Google Cloud came in and there was a difference this is actually like a linked decision if I could borrow that that example but I'll go back to the first Circle back to the first um step of the framework which was the problem statement even if this changes you've operated under this mandate for a while so the decisions you've made today based on this and based of your objectives
(25:08) will also impact future decisions and going back to that like mlh example that I tried to borrow I'll give you a generic example here let's say the problem that product you wanted to push as a specific communities using that product they're asking you to focus 100 of your time on that community and stop engaging with other communities two years later the product has been deprioritized and you're starting to push another product in new communities or other communities that you had stopped engaging with and
(25:41) you basically need to start from scratch so using a bit of inside a bit of foresight as well um at this step you could have said no we'll put 80 behind that product you want us to push but we will keep 20 to engage with all of our communities so we still have a presence there and we don't have to start from scratch coming to the end of the talk I just wanted to recap the framework again we phrased our decision problem We examined the team's objectives to make sure that we're still relevant we looked at the
(26:12) process of generating Alternatives we saw what the consequences of our decisions could be and what the trade-offs were and then we looked at the underlying uncertainty risk and Link decisions what I'd like to leave you with a quote from Malcolm gladwell's book blink I've been listening to the audiobook read by the author and it is great truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking not going to suddenly Veer off into psychology and the cognitive aspects of decision making
(26:43) that this book's about you might also think how she lost it she just showed us a very deliberate framework with tables and everything only to tell us to follow like our Instinct but you know you don't have to follow the framework maybe there's a couple of techniques you can use but if you leave with one thing live with a desire to make more informed decisions and not pure gut ones we often use our gut in devrel and most of the time we might be right but if your data is there examine it thank you [Applause]
(27:18) thank you for questions we do we have two and a half minutes and I don't know I think that was more of like a senior director Deborah talk so I'm pretty sure a senior a little foretell of the future um someone who hasn't asked a question yet hi I love tables so um my question is in regarding to when you are setting up these decision making sessions who do you involve your team the the stakeholders or what do you get them all in a room and have like biscuits and yeah that's an excellent question I think it
(28:03) depends on like who your stakeholders are as well I think there are different levels first what I'd like personally do get my team together also talk with like senior leadership in that team and get the team together first come up with a proposal and then see how you can enrich that before you make like the final decision remember one of the steps was learn from your experience so after you've brought the team together look at data like it's not a stakeholder but bring like your data um in in the room for that and then go
(28:38) to folks that you work with as we said like several teams have so many different stakeholders you're pushing like that specific product be big bring in product managers product marketing bring in all of the stakeholders you don't have to have everyone in one room you can have separate sessions and then just bring everything together and then you need to know like are you the decision maker is your leadership the decision maker but the more information and the more input you can have from other teams and then present that like
(29:09) the more um sort of like value you will bring to whoever is making that final decision thank you so that is actually time but where can people find you so that they can ask more questions yes you can find me in the break after please feel free to come and have a chat about this or about anything else thank you [Applause] foreign [Music]