Culture for Product-led Growth: creating "Flat Spaces" for product innovation

One of the hardest things to do, as a product leader, is harnessing the intelligence of all the people in the organization. But those who do, can unlock a more productive organization, that delivers more consistently on its goals and is more profitable. This is more important as the world navigates a shift away from traditional work, which is often done by experts; to work done in the information economy. In this new world, dynamic & creative teams of experts AND semi-experts, with a variation of skills; can better react to and solve unstructured problems for demanding customers.

Background

The workforce is changing rapidly because of the growth of the global knowledge worker economy where work is done by “semi-experts”. Peter Drucker’s prophesy about the rise of knowledge work is coming true with a vengeance. The essential ingredients of that kind of work is as he said: ‘ever-changing, dynamic and autonomous”. In short, “knowledge work is all about problem-solving and requires convergent and divergent thinking to answer all the simple and complex problems that arise out of daily work”.

There are 2 other main elements that Drucker did not emphasize enough. First, creative work is often done in teams, often multi-skilled and multi-disciplinary teams. And second, since the problem space is ever shifting, the only constant is rapid learning so that the same workforce can solve novel problems without excessive turnover. The value of experts who can learn a relatively fixed set of problems to solve, and solve them deeply — e.g. industrial work, professional work — is diminishing over time, in favor of teams of knowledge workers that are more flexible.

To summarize, modern day creative enterprises require non-linear thinking and work that comes from teams who can work well together and learn quickly. These worker’s main advantage is a focus on bringing creative solutions to unique problems, to market, and repeating that process in a systematized innovation cycle.

To fully support these kinds of teams, the workplace and workplace hierarchy must be significantly rethought. Often companies will hire these kinds of creative teams, in a bid to transform their business, but still have them sit in organizations that reflect an older expert-led workplace. Where, for the most part, only ideas created from strategy sessions and managers, get executed, and teams have very little leeway to inject and adapt ideas to their current tasks. An expert-led workplace thrives on really clear, detailed and repeatable process*, and clear hierarchy, while a dynamic creative teams thrive on “just enough process”, trust and full participation. It often requires a ‘flatter’ or non-existent hierarchy.

Why does full participation matter? It matters because often the best solutions come from unexpected quarters in the team. They often come from discussions where people build on ideas together and one person on the team has a breakthrough (built on other stated ideas) that takes the team over the top. There is a strong negative correlation of outcomes when that one person who contributes the “lynchpin idea” does not/cannot fully participate/find a voice, and the team never achieves the greatness it could. 

Flat spaces at Calendly and its ilk

To coax the most out of your team, you have to work to create spaces within your process, where everyone can contribute without the distraction of rank or title. I call this creating a “flat space” within your work process.

The first way you can do that, is to take a critical part of your innovation process and open it up to people of different skills and position in the work hierarchy. At Calendly we have a crucial meeting I call the “Product Trust”. This meeting served as a first filter for how to think of and scope the ideas on the roadmap, on the way to implementation. Product Managers and Department leads present what amounts to “why are we doing this?” and “how deeply should we invest?” They considered (and presented) a wide range of factors — customer challenges/problems and their urgency, customer feedback, competitive intelligence, market opportunity, an understanding of the customer workflows and more. The audience was a room of their peers (all levels) and different trusted representatives from other disciplines (design, sales, support, etc.). I moderated this meeting, but anyone could ask any question and register their contribution. At the end, based on the conversation, we formalized whether the presenting person’s team could go forward, make adjustments or abandon the proposed effort.

While I have a lot of experience as a product leader, I reasoned that the combined IQ and perspective in the room was always going to be larger than mine and tapping into that resources to make crucial decisions was key to success. This represented a conscious design of a ‘flat space’ within our innovation process.

I constructed the same kind of thing for examining late stage user experience designs in “design sparring sessions” full of people who had shown trusted UX acumen. For understanding how overall shipping was going, I regularly gathered key leaders (all r&d managers and pm leads) to discuss what was going well and what was not, in a “shipyard meeting” and had issues identified and resolved in a disciplined way.

For a bonus, establishing flat spaces in your innovation process, also establishes culture. The spectacle of a VP, CPO or CEO in a room where smart contributions are more or less equal to the outcome, helps other leaders in the organization look for their own opportunities to hear out even the most timid and junior member of their own teams.

The second way to create flat spaces is focusing on the culture of the squad. Software R&D professionals know that the ‘squad’ does not mean just a team of engineers. It means the mostly autonomous multi-disciplinary team tasked with building a solution that solves a customer problem, in a way that the organization can capture some profit. At Calendly and other places I’ve worked, this team is traditionally full of specific engineers, designers, product managers, marketers and more; maybe about ten or so people in total, suited to the problem space. They are tasked with owning a business result, a metric or advancing the benefit of a target persona with clear goals and accountability. In most software companies, they are de facto led by the product manager. This team also needs to create a culture of “flat spaces”. From a manager’s perspective, squads usually operate like an iceberg with 90 percent of their work is outside your direct observation; therefore making sure there are key principles and cultural elements to what they do outside your gaze, is important.

The best version of the squad is one that allows for each member to contribute to their ultimate goal in as egalitarian way as possible. This does not mean equality of roles and responsibilities — effectiveness often means a lot of clarity about those. It does mean the freedom to contribute their voice and ideas to solve challenges along the way of their mission, for everyone. There are certainly badly led squads that just do what its most senior and influential members ask or direct. But great squad leadership looks like maximum sharing, of as much information as possible, to every member; and a clear mandate for everyone to contribute their best ideas and work to the goals at hand.

The benefits of flat spaces

Flat spaces are crucial because they tap into the brilliance of everyone on the team. In workplaces where the problems are non-linear and non-procedural, this is key to maximizing your human investment. Companies spend a lot of time and resources hiring good people — brilliant even. Flat spaces helps unlock that investment to its full potential. At Calendly, when we gather a multi-disciplinary team to look at a user experience for example, I find that some of the most insightful comments and ideas can come from a customer support lead (who is included even at this stage) because of their instinctive connection to customer insight from resolving hundreds of customer tickets. These insights when incorporated by the team, allows you to satisfy the customer faster and better. In most organizations, customer support reps are not allowed anywhere near our idea factories and even if they are, may not feel empowered to share those ideas in the right place, at the right time.

In short, flat spaces maximizes your investment in your people and therefore makes you more profitable. In workplaces where success or failure can mean life and death, flat spaces take on the hue of being absolutely necessary. There is the famous example of the challenger disaster where engineers warned that the O-rings were not certified for a cold weather launch, but the higher up were under pressure to launch and did so anyway, to calamity. Even if it’s not the Challenger, many people have had the experience of working on projects that people in the rank and file did not believe would solve real problems, but did it anyway because they were told to. Only to get to the end to find that those individuals were right. And the organization could have saved a lot of money and time if it had listened and integrated their insights along the way.

One of my own personal experiences was working on the Windows 8 project at Microsoft. Many user tests had highlighted customer difficulties with its hidden action panel (opened by side-swiping the screen with a finger or mouse) — but the executive leadership took no action even though those difficulties were common knowledge within the R&D group. For this and other usability reasons, it didn’t do well in the market.

Summary

The world is moving away from workspaces populated with experts and mostly linear procedures; both of which take years to master and refine, and the problem sets and variety are relatively constrained. Workplaces of the future are going to be populated by semi-experts and multi-disciplinary teams that are solving critical problems of rich variety and combinations. Each new quarter can be very different with new sets of challenges. Software companies have worked in a world like this for some time, but that has continued to accelerate with the advent of cloud based SaaS (software as a service) companies working to digitize the information workforce. But these changes are not far behind for traditionally procedural spaces: healthcare, legal, manufacturing, industrial. It’s only a matter of time.

I think the best companies that will take advantage of these environments are the ones who will work the hardest to provide a level playing field for the best ideas from ALL their workforce. They will hack the prevailing hierarchical culture of work to get the best of both worlds — competent leadership and management, to keep the company moving forward. But also opening up critical processes to the ideas of a diverse set of employees at all levels, in order to make sure that the best ideas can be heard and implemented. This is often a prerequisite for a work culture that successfully focuses on solving customer problems and creates value faster.

Notes:

• How to create 'flat spaces' - coming soon
• Expanded and x-posted on Medium - https://medium.com/@Okosisi/culture-for-product-led-growth-fd25ceec5b30