Are Group Dynamics Killing Your Awesome Product?

The NYTimes’s article Group Study by Charles Duhigg reports findings from Google’s Project Aristotle through the story of one of their researchers, Julia Rozovsky. Project Aristotle is a multi-year undertaking whereby the tech giant is trying to figure out why some teams are successful and others are not. When they failed to find patterns through hard data, they dug deeper into the softer, qualitative aspects of collaboration and communication within the group.

While Duhigg caught on to Project Aristotle’s significance, I do not think he was able to capture all the indications for our tech and startup communities. Google’s findings are compelling for companies of all sizes but particularly important for Series A and B startups (1 st two rounds of serious venture funding). The savvy entrepreneur can mitigate the effects of likely failure ahead by tuning into their current team before adding more employees. Slow down to speed up.

Like Julia Rozovsky, I spent time in university, graduate school and in my career collaborating with all sorts of teams with unique dynamics, varying outcomes, and widely different goals. Lately, I find myself returning to one notable experience I had early on, like Rozovsky, in a business school class: Product Design & Development with Sarah Beckman at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Coming from the School of Information, I was teamed up with students from other departments to develop a product while also being coached and mentored along our Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Throughout product development we encountered personality conflicts, most memorably, when one of us was ready to choose the solution and run with it, while others wanted to continue thinking about the problem and evaluating our different options.

While the MBTI is not a perfect measure, its presence in the design process forced us to address our “social sensitivity” and “conversational turn-taking”, two factors Project Aristotle found to be important in successful group collaborations. Those of us moving full speed ahead had to slow down, and those of us unable to be decisive had to trust the others on the team. By all accounts, our project – a music player that kept score based on kids’ movements – was a success. I presented the product at ACM-CHI’s student design competition in 2006, and we obtained a preliminary patent one year later.

My experiences with MBTI coaching, and my work on my own DISC assessment, has led me to a similar question and analysis as Google put forward with Project Artistotle:

If we coached product development teams on personality and group dynamics rather than the agile process, would it drive better innovation? 

Faster is the Easy Way Out

Companies, particularly startups, are not addressing personality conflicts and symbioses as urgently as they are speed to delivery. Early on in the NYTimes article, Duhigg reports that companies are trying to figure out how to make employees into “faster, better and more productive versions of themselves”. More productive does not always jive well with faster.

Management teams often default to measuring objective metrics like velocity and number of features launched. As Jeff Gothelf shared, measuring features and evaluating speed are easy to perceive and evaluate, but not particularly accurate in determining the teams ability to innovate.

Understand that Innovation is a Process

Duhigg also points out that collaboration helps teams innovate faster, but it’s not simply the act of working together that drives innovation. It’s about working in syncopation, empowering teams to solve problems and reach outcomes, rather than measuring output.

If you can already admit that the  "fail fast" mentality is killing productivity and innovation, then you’re ready to really understand that innovation is a product of good processes and collaboration. Moving faster and building more features does not make a process nor does it create better collaboration, therefore it does not drive innovation.

The article explains that Google found “group norms override individual proclivities” which is what I learned using the MBTI, with my team, to adjust our work habits and expectations for the success of the product. So while we had brilliant minds on our team, our collective IQ was only as good as our ability to communicate and collaborate in a positive way.

As a leader, are you ready to look inside in order to innovate outside? Ask yourself:

• Does my team understand what is expected of them and how?
• Do the team members share the same values?
• Do they know what the company believes in?
• Do they all agree on the problem they need to solve, and the customer they are serving?

Implementing Project Artistotle’s findings is only for the bravest leaders amongst us. You have to be relentlessly and rigorously honest with yourself, and manifest that in your team. It took Google 3 years to figure out that the collective IQ of a group is more important than the individuals’ IQs on it. Now it’s time to benefit from their findings shared with us.

Be the Artistotle Your Team Needs

The truth is that since there are no clear patterns to indicate a team’s success except for their ability to enjoy working together, and each team has its own idiosyncrasies, you are facing a set of unique challenges that require an outside person to help you push you and your team further.

I believe these findings are particularly important for Series A and Series B startups, and using their guidance is not only for the billion dollar, well established companies with the luxuries of time and money. At a high growth startup, founders are facing many pain points that can be avoided or mitigated by implementing more rigor and deliberation in the hiring process alone.

When you’re bringing on new people, that is the best time to lay a solid foundation for your growth so that your team can handle the inevitable ups and downs of growing a company. For instance, as the speed of development by single engineers slows down because the code needs to be stabilized, rewritten or adjusted for scalability, the pressure for continued innovation and validation in the marketplace rises. The stakes are higher, the investors are more demanding, but adding new employees to keep the speed up does not solve the problem. In fact, it can slow the team down dramatically. New hires with new skills should be calculated decisions that meet your high standards.

Are you ready to look at your own management style, how your team collaborates with and without you, and take the steps to build your collective IQ? 

If you’re a new manager, I want to empower you to set a solid design and development foundation as your startup grows. I want that foundation to help you continue to refine your product, attract new customers, and increase your bottom line. I want to make you the best damn manager these people ever work for.

Duhigg wrote, “At the core of Silicon Valley are certain self-mythologies and dictums:…today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are clear-eyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new.” Let's think beyond the ping pong table.