If you want to change the status quo - understand it first.
Hands up who is willing to settle for the status quo? Who comes to work every day exceptionally keen to change nothing at all?
Of course, your hand remains firmly down by your side. That’s not you at all. You are a bold, agent of challenge, no more willing to accept the status quo than a poorly made espresso macchiato and a day old croissant.
Changing stuff in the pursuit of making it better is part of the every product manager's DNA. We are naturally restless. The standard PM interview question is ‘What’s your favourite app. How would you make it better?’. It doesn’t occur to us that there are some people on this planet who might say ‘I wouldn’t...it’s just fine thanks’.
As a product leader you are really responsible for three things
- Your product
- Your team (who’s in it; and how work is allocated between them)
- Your ways of working
Particularly when you start a new role, you might look at all three of these and have ideas about how they can be improved. I’m going to focus in this article mostly on product changes - but the same principles apply if you’re thinking of changes to team structure or ways working.
Obviously if you are working on something that doesn’t exist yet, your product isn’t going to need an overhaul. But you might still question the priorities or the approach of what’s being bulilt. At Sky, however, I found myself dealing with products that were the cumulative result of a decade of decisions - and there was a lot of change required.
But how to do it effectively? It took me a couple of years to learn this lesson: if you want to change something, it’s only when you know how it is why it is that you will know what you really want to change.
Here was my mistake - and I realised it was a mistake I had been making for my entire career. My assumption was that I was smart, and everyone who had gone before me was dumb.
I thought that my ideas were like pearls that none of my predecessors had ever been able to find.
Even if you don’t admit it, this is actually a pretty standard mindset. Time and time again new leaders to walk into a situation - assess it and come up with a plan for change. Only you then present it, and everyone rolls their eyes and said ‘Yeah - we thought of that...but..’
What I realised is that a better way to think is: I might be smart, but everyone who has gone before me was at least as smart. They’ve had all these ideas before, but they hit a wall.
The first lesson from this is to try a different approach. Instead of asking Have you thought of ..? You should ask What’s the best idea you’ve had that you haven’t been able to bring to life...and why?
And that is when you find out the walls they’ve been hitting - and your job - probably as part of a discovery process - is find a way over them in order to make stuff happen. That’s how real change happens.
What do I mean by a wall ? Well roughly they come in six types.
- Human
‘We didn’t do this because ‘X’ (name of senior person) hated the idea/ told us to exactly the opposite.
How to get over it: In a world of data-driven decision making these Highest Paid Person Opinions shouldn’t exist, but often they do - sometimes because they were snap executive decisions made with only partial data to move things forward. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't first be checked and challenge.
Is the person still around? Do they still hold this view? Has there been data since that would make them change their mind? We all work in fast moving industries, stuff changes; attitudes to what ‘good’ looks like moves on. Good leaders will change their minds in the face of good evidence.
2. Regulatory or contractual
‘We didn’t do this because the legal team said it breached a contract; or the regulatory team said...’ .
How to get over it: Check - is this still relevant? Has the regulatory framework - or your appetite for risk - changed at all? Ditto on contractual issues: is there are renegotiation looming? Could this be a negotiating point? Sometimes these things are real blockers - sometimes there is leeway. You have to get to the bottom of it, speaking with the source (ie the most senior available person in the legal / regulatory team).
3. Data/ research:
‘We didn’t do this because we had this bit of data that said it was a bad idea’. / ‘We tried that, and it didn’t work’
How to get over it: this case you really need to go back to that data and see what it said, and whether it still holds up. Even a totally rigorous A/B test might need to be redone - but check whether it really was rigorous or if there might be some bias in the sampling. Be particularly cautious about small user testing groups. Sometimes what you’re seeing is data that is at best neutral combined with a cautious mindset.
Obviously, if what you see is compelling data for you not to do this - accept it. Your idea might not be that genius, after all (sorry, but it happens!).
4 Resource Prioritisation
‘We couldn’t get funding’ / ‘This just wasn’t a priority’
How to get over it: Obvious, but it’s also the one you need to look at most carefully. If something has been deprioritised previously, something really needs to have changed in order for it to be prioritised now. Either, there is now more resource available; or the idea needs to be more urgent and/or more valuable than before - something you will have to prove. And this is actually something you need to tackle as part of the Discovery process: you’re being wasteful with everyone’s time otherwise.
Ironically - if you manage to get over or more of the other walls on this list, then this can rapidly solve itself.
5. Technical
‘This was going to hit our servers too hard’/ ‘The platform couldn’t support it’ etc
How to get over it: Perhaps you are technical enough to see a solution. But, I will assume not. You will need help here. You will need to have the right architects and engineers supporting your idea; and you will need to bring them with you on your journey: speaking to them early - persistently asking ‘what would it take..?’.
6. Business
‘We can’t do it because Team X said it will hit revenues/ gross margin’
How to get over it: Again - it’s a matter of checking with that team whether this really matters. They might have a new leader. Their priorities might have changed. Look closely at whether something is predicted to have a direct impact; or whether this is something more tenuous. Can you trial it to test it?
Sometimes you hit combinations of all of the above. We made a massive change to the structure of Sky Q in the summer of 2020. Creating a single page for each TV Show or Movie where before there had been different pages. Selling the idea took about 60 seconds. Getting over the walls took about six months. But we made it happen and it proved to be not just a valuable improvement in its own right, but a critical part of the UI that would later feature on Sky Glass.
But, as I’m sure you’ve spotted regardless of the type of wall in your way, the overall approach to dealing with them is similar. Faced with any wall you have to
- Check if it’s a real thing
- Speak to the right people
- Look at what’s changed since the last time someone tried to get over it
- Get your evidence together (Look for a way to do a test/ get new data)
- If there's good evidence against you, have the humility to accept that it’s actually not such a great idea after all.
And like I’ve said: all of this, by the way, is stuff that you need to flush out in your product discovery process. It’s always worth asking: Have we tried anything like this before? If it didn’t work...why not? and what will we do differently this time?
If there’s a higher level point about this - I guess it’s this: if you show a bit of respect for the past; you might be a bit more effective at building the future.
This is an early extract from an eBook I'll release in the Summer. Feedback welcome. If you want to know more - please sign up to my newsletter: The Ockham Bugle.