The power of context

Importance Of Context, By Tony Zampella

After more than 1 year of professionally working in Product Management, I realize the critical points we can improve to enhance the way we make decisions and deliver information to others, especially when working in a complicated workflow like Tech. That secret could be

Everything must go with the context.

I remember that day being a night. I was at a party with my friends, and one of them asked, “How would you feel if you knew your boss was cheating?”

Some people say “He is a terrible man, I don’t want to work with him”, others said, “I still work with him cuz it’s my responsibility, work should be separated from personal things.”

Then he said, It depends. Let’s ask more about why he cheated. As a man who works at a high level in society, there must be a reason why he does it. What is the current situation of his family? What if his wife doesn’t love him anymore but they have a barrier because of the kids? What if he knew that his wife was cheating too? What if he was drunk at that time and it’s the only one? What if he intentionally want it cuz cheating was so appealing? We shouldn’t draw a quick conclusion yet.

So why does it depend? Because we are lacking context

What is the context?

Context can be seen as a collection of interconnected pieces of information that help us understand a particular topic or situation.

“Without context, a piece of information is just a dot. It floats in your brain with a lot of other dots and doesn’t mean a damn thing. Knowledge is information in context… Connecting the dots” — Michael Ventura.

Context influences how we interpret information. It’s the glasses through which we look at and understand the world. For example, If I ask you: “Which one is better, Pho Hanoi or Pho Saigon?”, and the question is, “It depends, depends on the store, depends on the day, depends on your type, depends on your mood,…”

The Context in decision making

Currently, I am working in the product management field, basically, my job is to decide what feature to build and why to build it. If I want to propose a feature, I will be challenged by tons of “Why questions” from others about my thought process. I realized that method involves ASKING MANY QUESTIONS IN ORDER TO PROVIDE CONTEXT so that I could sharpen my thought process.

Anh T, Product Lead has shared with me that, in essence, deciding on product strategy and roadmap is just the work of gathering information internally: our current product, resources engineer, product design, PM, and externally: our industry, competitors, etc., then synthesizing and choosing the right direction to go. To sum up, it’s all about understanding the context of who we are and what others are to make the decision.

People often come to terrible conclusions when they don’t have enough context. Just like the AI/ML Model needs to have sufficient datasets to predict the outcome with high accuracy and precision. Our brain also needs a lot of context, and information to draw a good conclusion.

Explain in a scientific way that, According to Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow," human thinking and decision-making can be categorized into two systems. System 1 is characterized by intuitive, "gut reaction" thinking, while System 2 is characterized by analytical, "critical thinking" processes. Interestingly, we tend to rely heavily on System 1 thinking, even in situations where analytical thinking would be more appropriate. In fact, as Kahneman notes,

"When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions."

So when it comes to decision-making, you could try to trigger System 2 by thinking slowly and trying to gather as much context, and information as possible.

The more I experience thoughtful people, the more I realize they are the ones whenever answering my question, they often ask for a lot of context in order to draw a conclusion.

The Context in Communication

Lack of context is one of the basic flaws in communication. If you get into a situation where you finish talking about a topic, then people can’t get the point and ask you a lot of questions. There is a high chance that you haven’t provided enough context for them.

I am applying context-sensitive communication in my daily work.

In normal conversation, I try to state the context before going deep into my question. For example, if I ask my direct manager about “The logic of the recommendation feature“, I have to state, “What feature am I talking about? In which part of the flow feature am I stuck? And Why am I stuck?“

In every “Brainstorm ideas from people“ thread on Slack, I always state the context first so people can understand what is going on and avoid miscommunication.

As I observe, many of my colleagues fall into this pitfall when working with engineers or product designers to implement a feature. They often push them in the black box way, which means they haven’t well noticed how they implement it, they just care about when the task is finished.

The better approach would be the “White box way“, As a PM, I should care about their context: Which scope of work are they handling right now? What is the expected outcome of the task? High-level about which steps they have to go through? Moreover, I will let them know the context of the task: Why did I decide to build this feature? How it affects users and the company.

In essence, I will try to understand their context, care about how they work, and try to help them. I will also communicate the context of the task.

Wrap-up

Next time, when you are going to deliver the idea, remember to help the audience understand your context. Think slowly and gather context before making an important decision. or When you receive a question from others, let's consider the context aspect of it.

Because Everything must go with the context.

Cheer~