Saying “Because X Said So” is Not Alignment
Facilitating Healthy Communication in Your Product Team
Setting the Scene
You’re in a meeting room (or Zoom for those reading in 20–21), aligning on the final prototype for feature Moonshot with your product team, before running the first test on real customers. As the meeting progresses, one of the team members raises a question about a user interaction:
“Why are we doing this aspect of Moonshot ? We could remove another 4 weeks of engineering work if we went a different route that would achieve a similar experience.”
Little do they know, this discussion has has already happened and a group of stakeholders had made the call already. Maybe one leader called the shots and that was that*. To make matters worse, the only response the team members in the meeting get is:
“X said the first way was better, that’s why we kept it.
The Shortcut’s Pitfalls
We’ve all either had to make or accept difficult decisions in our day-to-day work, but this article isn’t about making these decisions. It’s about communicating the difficult ones. Unfortunately, a lot of us who work in product teams are too familiar with phrases such as the above thrown around.
Some that I hear often are:
- “We have to do that because X said so” or,
- “It’s still important to incorporate this part because X mentioned it that one time”
These comments become increasingly frequent when any company experiences high growth and playing telephone becomes a popular means of communicating information — not to mention a world where you may be working remotely and are forced to deliver information in a textual format.
When we attribute decisions to certain people we run into 3 side-effects that are detrimental to the following members of the product team:
- The justifier who references person X and to justify a decision will seem less knowledgable and as a result, less influential in the long run.
- The receiver who initially asked the question may start feeling that it may be pointless to provide input if someone else’s input is arbitrarily influencing the decision
- Occasionally, Decision Maker X might happen to be in the room. In this case they often have to jump in and add any context (which is not a bad thing, and I’ll get to this soon!), but may sometimes feel that the response was an act of subtle passive aggression, especially if the statement is occurs recurrently.
The end result of this sort of situation is not alignment, but confusion and the lack of morale within the team.
It is a tale as old as time: teams only reach alignment and gain motivation when everyone understands the goal a.k.a the why — a question that very conveniently pops up in the product world, and rightfully so. So why don’t we ever apply it in these situations?
While it is easy to pass off the question and simply reference or even blame the decision maker, what helps teams reach alignment for both the justifier and the decision maker to ask each other this why and re-iterate how it relates back to data, team goals, and business goals.
Our Favorite Question
When the original decision is made between the justifier and the person X, there are typically 3 directions that the conversation can take:
- You both agree on the decision — this is the ideal situation! Ensure you both understand why the decision must be made based on team and business goals.
- You disagree but you seem to have a good understanding of why the decision-maker is choosing to go this direction — it may not be ideal but if the discussion comes down to this, you agree it still lines up with your goals and there is (ideally) data to back it up*. Reiterate your assumed reasoning back to them to reach alignment.
- You disagree but you also have no idea why the decision-maker came to this decision. That’s the moment you ask our favorite question — “Why?” Based on their answer and your contribution to that discussion, you might find yourself in a different situation — they might actually realize that yours or their assumptions were misunderstood or incorrect.
In the case that their decision holds and you still disagree. It is important that you communicate that disagreement. Perhaps this battle is not yours to win, but this is when you will most likely find yourself playing the blame-game and saying “yeah that person is making us do it”.
But by having this conversation about context, you have all the data you need to commit to this decision with a justification. When future conversations occur, you can instead say:
“While I disagree with moving forward with interaction in feature Moonshot, we have committed to Y, because of <justification*>”
Decision making can be difficult, but it can be equally difficult to communicate that discussion to maintain the health of your product team. A team that feels aligned in its goals and vision is a happy team. Communicating these goals and decisions are crucial as your business/org/team scales.
*Ensuring the quality of decisions is a different topic than the one discussed in this article — there are a plethora of resources to understand frameworks and strategies to approach decisions, here are some of my favorites to read in tandem with this article:
Decision Making All Product Managers Should Know — Joanna Beltowska
Decision Making For Product Managers — Adrian Raudalschl
