A Culture of Compromise
When you’re building a product, everything’s a compromise. It’s important to foster a culture with honesty, openness and willingness to compromise at its core.
Each team in the company will have their own priorities. They each see the customers and product through a different lens.
The Sales Team
We need Feature X to land that important customer!The Product Team
We need to put time into improving the User Experience on Page Y.The Customer Success Team
We need to solve Bug Z affecting real users contacting us every day.The Development Team
We need to take the time to build Feature X properly to ensure maintainability, scalability, and flexibility.The Directors
We need to take steps toward realising the long term vision.
They’re all important, but you can’t work on everything at once.
So how do you decide?
You have to take a bunch of factors into consideration and come up with a prioritised list of what to work on. There’s rarely an obvious right or wrong answer, but there are some things worth remembering when weighing it all up.
Earn trust, and give it in return.
Be assertive, consistent, reliable, and genuinely listen. There’s no point even discussing unless the whole team trusts that everyone is working toward the same goal. If someone doesn’t have that trust, it’s possible they shouldn’t be in that senior position.
Be open and honest, always.
Understand the level at which people debate so you know when they really mean it. Find your own levels, and choose your battles wisely. If something really is business critical, you need to be able to communicate that effectively. If you’re just starting out, try scoring how important each issue is to your team out of 10, it can really help!
Be sympathetic of other teams.
Make an effort to gain an understanding of how other teams work, and the problems they’re facing every day. Have regular 1:1s to gain insight, and learn how long their processes take. It‘s always better if you can appreciate why something can’t be done immediately or if it’s more complex than it seems.
Use data.
Whenever possible, use data. Qualitative and quantitative. Be careful about choosing which metrics to read, but strong data beats opinion every time. An Account Manager can’t argue that a bug really needs to be fixed if there’s statistically significant data to prove that it isn’t impacting any users.
Get user feedback…
Get prototypes in front of users early. Validate your hypotheses with feedback, iterate, and reduce scope to tackle the problem as effortlessly as possible. Use the feedback as evidence, and to solidify the design, speeding up development.
…but the customer isn’t always right.
Give customers what they need, not what they want. Sometimes those things align, sometimes they don’t. Someone asking for a feature shouldn’t automatically justify the need to build it.
Consider the long term.
If you don’t want to be putting out fires forever, you need to make some decisions that improve the product in the long term, even if they don’t meet immediate short term requirements.
Surprise and Delight! 🎁
Small improvements to product journeys that customers take every day can have a huge impact. Remember to consider these ‘small fish’ when discussing the big issues.
Stay true to your business values.
Some of the best products are the result of uncompromising people. Compromise with your teams to try to make the right decision for the business, but don’t compromise the principles you all agreed best serve your customers and long term goals.
Putting it into action
Team member?
- Be confident in your opinions, and be confident if you think you know what’s best for users.
- Always be feeding back, questioning and challenging, but trust in leadership when decisions are made.
- Know when to really fight your corner, and know when it can wait.
Calling the shots?
- Don’t take too many shortcuts, but don’t aim for perfection every time either.
- Learn what you should get out quickly to satisfy a requirement vs. what should be a strong foundation for the future of the product.
- Be honest with teams about the reasons for each decision, and where their ideas land on the roadmap.
Again, unfortunately there’s rarely a right or wrong answer. If you and your team can learn to compromise when appropriate, pulling a little in each direction every few weeks, you’ll find that everyone can be happy.
