Emotions beat Rational Decisions.
One of the most frequent biases I encounter, is the usage of too many emotions in dealing with business decisions. The “I like it” typology.
To confirm their existing views, mangers, especially the entrepreneurial ones, use a lot of vivid examples of great people that were super-succesful and seemed to use a lot of gut feeling. Steve Jobs is one of the first to think about.
Internet and social media help us with numerous quotes that validate our fist hand, emotional decisions.
For sure, there is quite a distance between the storytelling that people love to read online and the real life. It is also a notable difference between Steve Jobs and all the rest of us.
To sort things out, this is a real job description for a Product Strategy Manager at Apple. Key words used: business rationale, segmentation, analysis, business cases, financial metric, quantitative skills, hard data, metrics, digest complex information, deal with complexity and ambiguity. There is no reference to extraordinary intuition or out of the world feelings.
Seems that Apple does not want to hire the “gut feeling” persons.
For sure this is less sexy than the nice warm stories which fuel our unconscious system of emotions, biases and shortcuts.
“Apple Job Description:
This role will help build the strategy and business rationale for key new long-term product initiatives. Establish product and associated service requirements, based on detailed quantitative analysis. Define and own program-wide business and economic / financial models. Critically evaluate industry incumbent comparative performance. Lead ongoing project strategy documentation and progress messaging. Contribute program management oversight to execution deployment and product/service rollout.
- Help bring new initiatives to market through business strategy guidance and hands-on product development.
- Develop user experience expectations, stories, and requirements that will be used to drive product specifications.
- Crystallize key insights based on quantitative analysis, including market research/intelligence, forecasts/trends, and emerging opportunities.
- Build new business cases, creating compelling P&L model justification along with clearly articulated/communicated strategic rationale.
- Independently primary research to support.
Key Qualifications:
- Experience defining market requirements for technology products and services, to include target segmentation, competitive analysis, and industry trends.
- First-hand experience in business financial metric analysis, and driving executive-level strategic decisions based on those findings.
- Deep analytical and quantitative skills; experience using hard data and metrics to back up assumptions and develop business cases.
- Proficiency to source and digest high volumes of complex information, and concisely present the underlying key messages.
- Results-oriented track record of being able to deliver on complex initiatives, solid project management skills and attention to detail.
- Ability to manage multiple projects with competing priorities.
- Possess a unique blend of business and technical savvy; a big-picture vision, and the drive to make that vision a reality (…)”
Exactly that’s the situation that Apple wants to avoid, when mind of mangers cannot explain.
The full link: https://www.global-workplace.com/job-preview/?job_id=264225&utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email_topjobs
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