Lesson 1a: Clarity, and the tools to get there.

(This is a follow-up to my ‘0. Lessons from a career in tech’ - see comments for a link)

How do you get 10s, 100s or 1000s of people to effectively work on the right thing, when the right thing is often unknown and needs to be discovered?  Doing fewer things well is a necessary part of this (see lesson 2!), but not sufficient.  I learned repeatedly over my career that clarity is essential, and is very often missing or at least inadequate.

Bluntly, if different people have different understanding of the product or different views of the relative importance of different aspects of the product, then bad outcomes will happen.  All the people in the team should have the same understanding. AND, all of leadership overseeing this team need to share that same understanding.  The role of the leader is to ensure everyone has the exact same understanding of what is most important and what the product vision is, and the critical path and decision-points to get there, even while that very same product is being created and new things may be learned which require adaptation.

So often you find teams (whether teams of 10 or teams of 1000+) where each time you ask a different person “what is most important” (in this product, or in the next 6 months, etc), you get remarkably varied answers.  You might expect this to be a more frequent, obvious, understandable problem in a team of 1000+, but in my experience it is just as frequent in small teams.

This is a major problem.  These misalignments slow down the work, lead to wrong things being built, poor user experiences, insufficient value, and often lead to alpha/beta-launches where good decisions can’t be made.

I’ve created remarkable value by asking, over and over again…

• What is most important?

• Why is “A” the most important priority right now?

• Some people think “B” is the most important, because of x,y,z… what’s your take?

• “A” seems to contain a whole bunch of sub-topics - which of A1, A2, A3 is more important?

… and distilling the answers into 1 coherent vision and priority for the teams, with a clear story as to why that particular vision+priority is the most important, and why other things are not.

In a new product area, with a lot of ambiguity, this process can take several iterations across the team and stakeholders, and span over 4-6 weeks to get right.  As these iterations proceed, you begin to ask more detailed questions, like:

• What metrics & criteria will we use to quantify success or failure?

• Will “A” fully prove or disprove this stage in creating this new product?

• What quantified goals does the team need to have for “A”?

• So if “A” fails, then we should definitely kill this product?

It is essential that you bring in ALL important perspectives here. How many there are will be very product dependent. In some of the more complex Products that I worked on at Meta, there were 10 or more perspectives involved: Engineering, Data Science, Design, User Research, Legal (Product, Policy, Competition), Sales, Product Marketing, User/Partner/Developer, Intermediaries, Surface teams (Facebook, Instagram, say), other teams responsible for Ads manager, etc…  Some of these perspectives naturally have a strong degree of overlap, but many of them absolutely do not!

It is not easy to do this “ask, distill, iterate,…” well.  You need the ability to understand and assimilate all those different perspectives. Your own thoughts need to be incredibly clear.  Spotting big misalignments or contradictions is easy - you need to be very good at spotting subtle ones.  You need to be able to dig down into some of the details, and make good decisions about where it is worthwhile to dig into the details.

In my next post (1b) I’ll talk about a simple tool that I found very useful to help this process….

When you can create this clarity, and you can deliver that single story and cohesive vision to a team, it is amazingly powerful.  In particular:

1. They are liberated to get on with their best work without being regularly confused by what others are doing

2. Leadership are no longer confused and distrustful of the direction

3. Work accelerates, focuses, and it becomes much more possible for your team to find creative approaches to achieving the small number of clear goals that have been agreed.

4. Your work as a leader simplifies, and can at least temporarily focus on other important things - like unblocking the team.

Overall this clarity shifts success from being slow, painful and unlikely to being much more likely and fast to prove or disprove. With difficult, ambiguous problems that’s exactly what you want!