Pushback is a gift
Becoming better at managing pushback
Product Managers are blessed with cross-functional teams. But sometimes this feels more like a curse than a blessing when decision making goes slower, things take longer to get done, and we receive pushback that we aren’t able to overcome. Juggling highly opinionated people isn’t for the faint of heart and it’s easy to get frustrated and give up at every sign of pushback.
But what if pushback was a gift? What if we cherished the no’s, the contrarian opinions, and the challenges? By flipping the burden into a blessing, we can become much more effective PMs. It took me many years to make this mindset shift; to not see the opinions as against me but instead as a key component of effective decision making and my own success as a PM.
Let’s consider what pushback actually is: it is input into decision making. Beneath the emotion driven opinion is hidden a rationale which is up to us to uncover. It’s a data point that needs to get factored into our decisions. It is not something to be taken lightly or brushed aside because of notions like “engineering always says it can’t be done” or because you need to move fast and make a decision quickly. Pushback is a key piece of data that should never be ignored.
Yet, the opposite happens. I’ve seen too many PMs either don’t ask for any input while making decisions or don’t actually factor it in their decisions. This typically happens when the PM isn’t able to overcome pushback or doesn’t know how to handle it effectively. But this is dangerous. Not only will the decision be wrong, leading to product failure but you will also lose the trust of your team and therefore, completely fail as a PM.
So how does one overcome pushback effectively? Let’s break this down into process and artefact.
Process
The PM is not the sole decision maker but is the owner of the decision making process.
It is the PM’s responsibility to go about the process in the most scientific and surgical way possible. This means deeply considering all the inputs or pushback, evaluating options against a set criteria, and using an objective approach to arrive at an answer.
At the same time, a PM must bring all of the key stakeholders along. From a junior team member to the CEO, every single person who this decision affects must participate in some way or another. And it is up to the PM to ensure that everyone understands the details and is able to reach a conclusion (not consensus) together.
This is where the artefact comes into play.
Artefact
A written document is the most effective way to drive a decision making process. This is best explained by an analogy:
When you open a puzzle box, you encounter a thousand disparate puzzle pieces. Some pieces are found already joined together, and some you need to deliberately untangle because they only appear to fit together. Then you begin the process of searching, sorting, and classifying. Perhaps you build out the edge of the puzzle as those pieces are easier to find, or you start building a particular section that’s easily coming together. Regardless of the approach, each piece is carefully laid out one by one until the picture emerges. This is what a written document is useful for.
It gives us the ability to sort through the disparate pieces of information and put them together in a way that makes sense. Sorting through pieces of information is hard to do when there are many highly charged and sometimes opposing points of view. The only effective way to traverse through these inputs and think through pushback is by writing it down one by one, grouping the themes together, and then fitting the pieces together.
What’s more is that a written document gives you the ability to facilitate a productive back and forth between stakeholders; showing the team not only that you are addressing their pushback but giving everyone the opportunity to help shape the arguments as well. It creates the necessary space needed for deep dive conversations that unravel pushback and helps everyone understand the implications or the reason why it exists.
A written document is so powerful that I would go as far as to say that if a PM isn’t using some sort of “document” to make decisions, they aren’t being effective. The “document” can be notes in a jira ticket, a presentation, or a whiteboard but it’s got to be written down. In short, a PM should be writing a document for every single decision.
Focusing on the process and artefact is the most effective way to manage pushback. It isn’t an art, it’s a science that can help PMs build the muscle to be able to tackle pushback effectively and in fact, lean on them to do their jobs better. This is the unique value that a PM brings to a team — the ability to pull everyone together and collectively drive an outcome, in spite of the charged and opposing points of views.
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