Struggling to implement [Greatest Product Design/Development Process Ever]? Quit blaming the process!

Hi, my name is Dave and I’m a Pleaser. I hate letting people down. I hate feeling like I can’t deliver on something. When I end up with too many things on my plate, my first reaction isn’t to do fewer things, its to quickly search my Safari Reading List (117 articles), or Amazon Wish List (79 books) and find the “10 Secrets Everyone is Hiding From You About How to Fit More Things on Your Plate”.

Being a product manager in a start-up is hard. It’s like the whole company comes around and asks me for something they need, and because I’m a pleaser, I like to give it to them, plus a bit extra! The only problem is it’s a terrible thing for the company and I’m doing everyone a disservice. No process in the world can fix the fact that I’m a Pleaser.

In the end, doing product right is like having great product–market fit, only its about the process fitting your team’s culture, mentality, personality, and attitude.

If the process doesn’t account for your team’s collective weaknesses then eventually entropy takes over and everything comes to a grinding halt.

Let’s take a look at how we fail our product design/development processes when we lack self-awareness and situational awareness.

Self-awareness

We have to take the time to truly stop and reflect about ourselves and our team. Do we deeply know our weaknesses? It took me a long to recognize— and then admit—that my desire to please was hurting my team.

Be willing to explore the nagging feelings, the insecurities, and anxieties. Acknowledge and accept your weaknesses, and the weaknesses of others.

Situational awareness

Self-awareness is the first step to truly seeing what is going on with your product process and is the key to developing situational awareness. Until I acknowledged that I am a Pleaser, I was blind to how I was enabling our team to take on too many projects simultaneously.

Without self-awareness there is no way you can see your present situation clearly enough to know how you can improve.

Develop situational awareness by exploring questions like: What challenges are you really facing? Are you even working on the most important problems? What is absolutely critical to your product’s/business’ success? Where are the distractions coming from? How do you personally contribute to the process breaking down? Where are the true bottlenecks? Does everyone see that there are bottlenecks? How is all of this impacting how you deliver value to your users/customers? How are the team’s personalities, weaknesses, or attitudes impacting the process?

Again, chances are the problem isn’t the process. Take advantage of your self-awareness and become situationally aware.

Fixing the brokenness

If you’ve worked on developing self and situational awareness, then the next step is to find your True North. What are you really trying to accomplish? What are the intermediate steps along the way? Start there and keep pushing. When you get stuck trying to reach your intermediate step, don’t deviate from True North. Be patient, keep trying, keep refining.

Self-awareness, and situational awareness will help you see the changes you need to make. Remember, processes don’t live in a vacuum, look at yourself, and your team and have some radically honest conversations.

You’ll get there, and when you do, let me know what you learned along the way. And because I’m a pleaser, chances are I’ll still be overcommitting myself and scratching my head as to why things aren’t working the way they should.

Did any of this ring true with your experience? I’d love to hear your thoughts.