The one thing product teams can learn from getting to the top 4% of the video game League of Legends
TLDR: It’s better to have the whole team aligned on a 80% optimal approach than unaligned on the perfect one.
I learned one thing from playing too much video game and ending up in the top 4%
During my time at university I played a ton of League of Legends - a competitive game where you’re matched with 4 strangers with the goal of beating 5 other players of similar strength.
I was never meant to be any kind of good: I have sloppy reflexes and poor hand precision.
However, I quickly realized that I could tip the scale by pushing my team to commit in unison to the same decision.
Throughout a game there are tons of micro-decisions: do you stay and fight, do you attack a tower or go for an objective in “the jungle”, etc,.
I would try and make sure the team acted as an unit: take the lead when nobody called the shots, or follow when someone was taking a chance somewhere. This, even when I didn’t agree with that very decision. More often than not, our cohesive unit prevailed their scattered reactions.
In product team there are always options and trade-offs
Similar scenarios tend to happen within product teams: engineers having to decide on a technical stack, designers having to set brand guidelines or product managers needing to formalize tracking conventions.
All of these decisions will have several reasonable options, each with their own tradeoffs.
A recent challenge we’re facing is how we’re going to style our Next.js frontend applications:
- Extend Material-UI, but having to wait for the v5 version.
- Use Tailwind, to benefit from its purge.
- Use styled-components
- Use emotion
- …
We’ve been arguing then agreeing, then arguing again, going back to what we had said, challenging what has been done, etc,.
This is a case where we’re now striving for alignment rather than for perfection.
Success depends more on the team’s alignment than on the solution’s perfection
“Agree and commit, disagree and commit, or get out of the way”
- Scott McNealy circa 1983
This is also one of Amazon’s principles:
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit — Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
We are hiring
If you’re ready to commit, whether or not you agree on the choice to be made, have a look at the opportunities we have within our product and engineering team:
