The 7 Deadly Sins Causing Product Management Erosion (Part 1)
This article series discusses so-called “negligible” professional sins we commit when we manage or involved in the production of new technology and eventually erode our ability to deliver it.
It’s a great read for anyone working in the field and looking to avoid said sins or manage them as they are performed by them, their peers or the people working for them.
From Personal to Professional Redemption
A couple of weeks ago, Jewish people all around the world commemorated Yom Kippur. Literally meaning “day of atonement” — Yom Kippur is a time we spend fasting, praying and basically doing anything we possibly can to repent our sins both towards our faith and towards one another.
Doesn’t matter what faith (or lack of faith) you come from, handling mistakes is an extremely effective concept in management in general and Product Management in particular. One specific element of dealing with mistakes came to my mind after Yom Kippur which brought me to write this article series.
An old fable tells the story of a disciple coming to a Rabbi asking him for a lesson about the nature of sins. The Rabbi takes him out to the yard and shows him a bunch of rocks — 2–3 very large ones and many small ones — spread all over. He then tasks him with taking all the rocks from the yard into the house, which the disciple promptly does. After completing the task, the Rabbi asks him if he could get every rock back into the yard to the exact location it was. The disciple answers that he could do it for the large rocks — but it would be simply impossible to do it for the small ones, as he can’t possibly remember the original location of any of them.
The lesson here is that the wrong things we do in life tend to split into harsh things — which make a huge impact and scar our memories, and small things which we almost see through, hardly noticing they were there. It is very intuitive to think it’s only the big things that count (which they do, of course) — however, the small, practically daily mistakes we make could be just as harmful and to some extent — more dangerous, as the erosion they create is something the root cause of could be impossible to trace.
The Power of Habits
Habits — whether we realise it or not — are powerful. They could be powerfully beneficial and they could be powerfully destructive. Just the same as it’s not one moment that will make you physically fit or unfit, it’s not one moment that will make your company successful or go bankrupt. The good news is that forming good habits and avoiding bad ones usually requires not much more than the proper attention and knowledge while having the discipline to utilise them.
There’s a great body of work on what are some great habits to develop, for example the highly recommended 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, and of course there are great best practices for each profession which deal with the kind of habits that benefit it. However, in this article series we take notice of the small hick ups that tend to happen when we manage the creation of new technology that could accumulate and become harmful if not destructive, what they usually mean and how to deal with them.
Even putting them in the back of your mind is a huge step towards dealing with them and as we said — you don’t need more than just a little discipline to rid your culture of their impact. Dealing with their eventual effect could be nearly impossible.
To put it in other words — if for any reason you think avoiding these is hard, try not to.
#1 — Micro Management
More Micro Than You Think
When we think of micro-management, we usually have in mind a stereotypical caricature of a supervisor looking into the smallest details of everything his employees / peers do in a way which is blunt and really obnoxious. However, what we don’t realise is just how micro micro-management can really be.
In my view, every action in which we provide unsolicited input that doesn’t add value to the performance of a task qualifies under this category. It might seem small to you doing it, but you just need to think of how it feels when done to you to realise how much of a problem it can really be.
This includes those pesky little check-ins on whether the assignment is done already or “how is it going?”, those follow up emails that include nothing but a single “?” and of course every attempt done to meddle in the way someone is doing their job which is completely out of your scope. It might not be a big part of what you do — it might actually be extremely negligible if you measure the time you invest in it compared to other things you do — but erosion-wise, it makes a ton of impact.
To me, this is actually one of the worst phenomena eroding not just trust within teams — but the reputation of product management professionals and middle (and perhaps senior) management all around.
Push is Better Than Pull
The ideal method of receiving information about any task done is via “push”, not “pull”. When information about the status of a task is pushed to you, it means whoever is performing it feels the current result is ready for feedback or your input is otherwise needed. You thus get an opportunity to express your opinion about it, when this opinion coincidently would usually mean the most.
The way it works (again, ideally) is: we do everything we can to set the stage for someone to do the job he was hired to do, i.e. — proper planning and communicating of the plan to relevant stakeholders getting both their agreement the plan is worthwhile and their commitment to perform their part. We then wait for the result which arrives in a timely manner.
When that doesn’t happen (or doesn’t happen the way we want it to) — we tend to lose our nerve and intervene in what’s going on when really (or at least on the surface) — there’s really no reason to; we don’t add any new input, nothing happened outside the task performance which should change the way it’s done and usually even the schedule set for it is hardly up.
Small Actions, Big Consequence
This shows, even if not intended — lack of trust in the person performing the task. Worst yet — it usually always means that setting the priorities which was (supposedly) done prior to issuing the task was wrong or not clear enough to everyone — since something matters to you more than it matters to the person doing it. It could also be an indication you were mislead into thinking you had someone’s commitment for the task — yet you didn’t.
Either way, when you get the urge to intervene in whatever way in what someone else is doing — even if it’s a person working directly for you — you take the risk of committing this sin. We’ve all been there and we know that when it’s done to us it could be one of the most annoying “little” things that over time have drastic results over our relationship with the person doing it; we develop a lack of openness and trust with him, we lose respect and professional appreciation for him, we have this unexplained anxiety whenever that person contacts us (one of the best tests to figure out how you feel about someone, is imagine the expression on your face when you see his name shows up on your phone when there’s an incoming / new WhatsApp message) and we suddenly find other places to be when we know we might run into him.
So, the urge to micro manage and caving into it are not only signals we might be doing our job wrong, they could actually have a devastating effect on the relationship which we need to nurture in order to do any aspect of our job.
Prevention Simply Requires Preparing Properly
As with almost anything, preventing the urge to meddle in your peers’ / employees’ work is more effective than trying to deal with it.
The way this is done is through the following trivial, yet sometimes (or most of the times) overlooked steps of planning any kind of execution:
- Step #1: Define the tasks needed to be done (and just what it means for them to be “done”), based on a common goal you wish to achieve
- Step #2: Communicate this information clearly to all stakeholders
- Step #3: Validate the clarity of the communication (repeat step 2 if you fail to do so)
- Step #4: Make sure you have a sincere commitment of every relevant stakeholder (come on, you know when it’s not sincere). If you fail to get the commitment — repeat this entire process (from step #1) for the relevant tasks. Make sure this time the stakeholder who was not in agreement is in the loop
- Step #5: Define agreed upon check points for monitoring the execution
- Step #6: Step back and wait for the push of the results or step in if something changes
The Truth is a Powerful Motivator
We all live in the real world where things change or where the planning was simply not done perfectly, and this is why there’s probably always a good reason to step into someone’s execution. Notice the emphasis on “good reason”.
A meeting with a client may have moved up, the company’s priorities may have changed or you may have made a mistake in your original planning and you figured out something is probably more important than you thought it was or should be done in some other way — it doesn’t matter.
If you have even tried to plan assignment properly, the reason why you suddenly want to do a pull instead of waiting for a push regarding someone’s work is because something changed — whether it’s something external or it was you simply realising you made some mistake or had an oversight. Either way — if you want to do it, there’s probably some logical reason for it.
The problem starts when you intervene in what someone else is doing without communicating why you’re doing it. You might be afraid the reason itself is not good enough, think it’s non of their business or talking about it might involve you taking responsibility for a mistake (which, let’s face it — is always hard) — so you don’t share this new input properly or at all.
This is a big mistake.
If you simply tell the truth about what lead you to basically cross the agreed upon task boundary — it would probably be a great motivator. And on the plus side, if it involves any kind of mistake you made — being forced to do so would dramatically reduce the chances of you making it again, as the conceived price tag of it would now be higher.
Ironically, this is especially true when the person you address is someone working directly for you as it could drastically affect your leadership stance. Even if the case is one of your subordinates missing a schedule and not even coming forward about it (which is a problem to be dealt with, but on a different plain) — the schedule is not as crucial as why it’s a problem the task is yet to be done. Keep this in mind.
So, to sum it up — before providing any advice or checking in on anything somebody’s doing:
- Realise yourself why you’re making the approach, and whether or not it’s in deed necessary and the reason justifies it
- Share this information with the person you’re addressing in a clear and non evasive manner (skip using terms like “but” or placing any blame on anyone)
- Only after this — suggest your input or make your request
Telling the truth — sounds simple, right? If only more people knew…
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In the upcoming articles of this series we’ll review the other sins and how to detect and manage them.
If you liked this and want more — please clap and follow me (if you haven’t already). It will magically make the follow-up articles come to life much quicker :-)
