Everyone preaches the 70-20-10 rule: 70% experience, 20% coaching, 10% formal learning. It's gospel in corporate training rooms everywhere.
However, it's just too slow for accelerated growth !
The 70-20-10 rule assumes you'll slowly grind through decades of "experience" before you develop decent intuition. Organizations can't wait for you to build better muscle for intuition—traditional experience-based learning is inefficient when markets move fast and the competition never stops.
And if you want to climb towards a leadership role, that's a luxury you can't afford either. Senior decisions aren't black and white—they're greay, they’re messy, and require leaps of faith.
What you need is Decision Reps. Think of them as mental muscle-building exercises. Just like you don't go to the gym once a year and expect to bench press 100 kg, you can't make a handful of consequential decisions over five years and expect world-class intuition. You need to regularly get the reps in.
The 3 Types of Reps that Build Mental Muscle
1. Core Reps:
Most product managers make decisions and immediately move on to the next problem. They're missing the most valuable part: the reflection.
Core Reps are your personal decision retros. They're systematic reflections on your own past decisions to extract lessons and build pattern recognition. Think of them as doing a retrospective after every project - only this time, it’s your decision-making, outcomes and achievement’s being reviewed.
Every decision you make contains data about your thinking patterns, biases, and blind spots. Most professionals miss this opportunity by never looking back systematically. Effective product managers approach this differently—they mine their decision history religiously because they understand something crucial: pattern recognition is what separates competent execution from strategic leadership.
When you reach senior levels, decisions become greay and messy. You need intuition built on thousands of micro-lessons, not just a handful of major experiences spread across years.
2. Shared Reps:
While everyone else is networking for the sake of collecting LinkedIn connections, you should be analysing decision patterns from every conversation.
Shared Reps are learning from other people's experiences through strategic listening. Every war story, podcast interview, and casual coffee chat contains compressed wisdom from someone else's real-world decisions. The trick is extracting the lessons learnt systematically instead of just nodding along politely.
Think about it: every successful product leader has made thousands of decisions you haven't faced yet, and every failure story contains a lesson you can apply before making the same mistake. Why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from their experience? Most people listen to stories for entertainment, but effective product managers listen for patterns. When someone tells you about their biggest product launch disaster, they're handing you a valuable case study—if you know how to extract the lessons learnt.
The math is simple: one hour listening to someone's 10-year career journey gives you decision patterns that would take you years to discover on your own. You're not just accelerating your learning—you're learning from mistakes you'll never have to make.
3. Synthetic Reps:
The best workout is one you can do anywhere, anytime, with nothing but your brain and a good framework.
Synthetic Reps are analyzing other people's decisions as if you were in the driver's seat. You take any business outcome you see—successful or failed—and reverse-engineer the decision-making behind it. Then you ask the critical question: "What would I have done differently?"
This is your mental gym. No waiting for the right experience to land on your desk. No hoping your company faces interesting strategic challenges. You can build decision-making muscle by dissecting every business move happening around you, from Ninja's product line expansion from single-use blenders to complete kitchen ecosystems (who needs a Ninja creamy) to why your local café's has introduced weekend surcharges. Every company pivot, product launch, or strategic failure becomes your personal case study. You're not just consuming business news—you're using it to train your strategic thinking.
The beauty of Synthetic Reps is volume. You can analyze dozens of decisions every week without waiting years for your company to face similar challenges. It's like having access to every company's boardroom discussions without the politics or
No Rest Days
Once you start building this habit, you can't turn it off. I've caught my mind drifting, breaking down Logan Roy's power moves or empathiszing with both the frustrated employees and the managers making impossible calls while eavesdropping on café workplace gossip at the table next to me.
This isn't about becoming a decision-making robot—it's about building the intuitive foundation that lets you navigate ambiguity with confidence. Most people wait for experience to find them. Decision Reps let you actively train your intuition, pump up your pattern recognition, and build the mental strength that separates good product managers from great leaders.
Over the next week, keep a note of every decision rep you do. A real one, a story someone shared, or a hypothetical you worked through. Then look back. What did you learn? What would you do differently next time?
Before you know it, you'll be building decision-making muscle that would have taken years to develop through traditional experience alone. Your future self will thank you later.
