Ego killed the empowered product team | Hacker News Reader

Ego killed the empowered product team

jeffgothelf.com

77 pointsmooreds43 comments

In my experience, it's fear over ego. At the last company I worked for, the CEO discovered Marty Cagan and immediately switched the entire company over to following his recommendations. I was on a product team, and we came up with our own strategy to meet our OKRs. The CEO didn't like our approach, and decided that, actually, he was going to both set the objectives, and results, and tell us how to achieve them. We were basically a feature team.

But it wasn't ego, it was fear. The company was running out of runway, we just hadnt been told yet. The CEO adopted the product team strategy as a Hail Mary, out of sheer panic, and he sabotaged it for the exact same reason: he was terrified of not trying it, and then terrified of it not working.

Not only because of this anecdote, but because of several other important ones, I view leadership as being generally fear-driven in their decision making. Ducklike, they appear calm and even confident on the surface, while desperately thrashing and failing below the surface. Or, like someone falling down a hill and reaching out for anything to hold on to.

"We're running out of runway; let's change our development approach"? Talk about counterproductive...

Fear/panic is not known for inducing rational decisions.

Well look at all the unicorns that pivoted their way into success. Clearly you're supposed to pivot! /s

Not to pick a fight, but there is this misconception from salaried employees that the running of a company is mostly calm and relaxed, and there are certainty where next months salary is going to come from. Or at least that good management achieves this.

But in reality, leadership of a company is constant chaos, the image of the dog with room on fire saying everything is fine comes to mind.

Who knows what the right decisions is, everybody has feet of clay.

There is some truth in this. In the startup world, we often tend to avoid this framing because it isn't positive - but every startup begins in the process of failing (running out of resources and ceasing to be a going concern, one way or another).

The term "runway" is often interpreted to mean: "We need to get this plane going fast enough to lift off before the end of the road". Reality is more complex, because there isn't a plane yet. You have to design and build that as you go, and if you get it wrong, you crash.

Management is in this position: without action, the company will die. With the wrong actions, the company will die. Many decisions close doors, and it's not exactly clear from the start what sequence of doors will lead to the company not dying.

If you involve the team too much in the sausage-making aspects of this, they will invariably become distracted, lose focus, and the company will die. If you leave them too much in the dark, they will lose trust, and the company will die.

It's not easy, and all of this leads to the duck nature: calm up top, under the water feet are paddling like crazy.

"If you involve the team too much in the sausage-making aspects of this, they will invariably become distracted, lose focus, and the company will die. If you leave them too much in the dark, they will lose trust, and the company will die."

Incredible truth in this statement!

When I was much younger I spent two years trying to run an open company only to be “openly told” that several of my employees didn’t want to know and that it was too stressful for them to go through all of the tribulations.

Some people honestly don’t want to know what’s happening. They just want to do their jobs and get paid. And I came to the conclusion that it’s perfectly acceptable.

Still love the open company concept. But if you love and respect the people you work with you have to think pretty deeply about it and whether it’s actually of service to your employees, investors and team.

It's the old "you are not the customer" but applied to management. I really really want to be told what the high level goals are and come up with a solution. So of course when I started managing people I worked really hard to communicate those high level goals and let them decide the how. They told me no thanks please just let me know what tickets to work on.

People are different and motivated by different things and that's ok.

The dictator who listens really seems to be what the majority prefer because they don't actually want to be accountable for those decisions they just want a seat at the table.

> The dictator who listens really seems to be what the majority prefer because they don't actually want to be accountable for those decisions they just want a seat at the table.

Yes. I would go so far as to say people want to experience the feeling of making decisions, of responsibility, without actually having any.

I was also incredibly optimistic about this approach in the past but life experience has shifted me away from it. I personally can't understand people not wanting to know. It is weird dynamic. I changed jobs a few years ago and went from management to an IC role for a while. It was nice to focus on technical problems but it also did my head in. I felt incredibly neurotic knowing that stuff was going on but I was in my little bubble of productive calm.

What a fantastic and succinct description. Developing something new, whether you're a startup or an established company, feels like that. In a large company, dying may mean something less dramatic, but it may still lead to a team or division sacked.

Yep. This is why getting people talking about priorities and focus is job one on the product side of things. The conversation will look different depending on size, but it’s still there.

> everybody has feet of clay.

Where is that from?

It goes back to a Biblical reference, book of Daniel:

This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass/His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay/Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.

It has been used a lot since then, for something that seems impressive but is actually weak at the base. I'm not sure when "iron and clay" got reduced to just "clay", but it was by at least the early 19th century.

Starting and running a company is very scary, so it's not surprising that many people who are not cut out for the emotional work involved end up like this.

> The company was running out of runway, we just hadnt been told yet.

At least your CEO didn't dump all the bad news and resulting anxiety directly on the team. Good job, it's exactly what he's paid for.

Well, instead he waited until we were almost out of money, then laid off a very large percentage of the company one morning.

That sounds like the right thing to do. If you have to do layoffs, it's better to do them all at once and then tell everyone how much runway you have left. Doing several smaller once, making everybody unsure of the future and afraid for their jobs is much worse.

I’ve worked for and with many people who’s stress response is to try and control everything, especially the flow of information (read as hoarding information and giving people the bare minimum, and often less than that).

It inevitably leads to more stress, not just for them, but for the whole organization. I’ve never seen it play out well long term and wish I had a good way to call it out and correct it. At least I can more clearly see the pattern now that I’ve run into it a few times.

> he was terrified of not trying it, and then terrified of it not working

What a great piece of insight and observation. That really sums up so many situations where we seemingly shoot ourselves in the foot. It's the dilemma of being afraid of not going down a path but also fearing what we may find at the end of that path.

This is very true, and is also why we have things like corporations, founder cash-outs, outlandish executive compensation packages, finance, golden parachutes, etc. The whole idea is to make failure somebody else's problem, so that you're set for life regardless of what you do. This takes fear out of the equation, so that (supposedly at least) you can make rational decisions and it becomes a simple dollar-maximization exercise.

It'd be an interesting experiment to see if we could take executives out of the decision-making loop and just have AI (or aggregated intelligence) make the decisions, since computers are generally better at it than humans and certainly don't have pesky emotions or egos to get in the way.

Boy, this sure sounds familiar.

Every seed stage company ever....

Somehow the lack of sales are the product teams fault? Let's start messing with the product to figure out why sales aren't happening. Haha, it's so sad it's almost funny!

A lot of founders hire a product team way too prematurely. A lot of founders who have experience making product think that the product sells itself....

I agree with the author’s sentiment that product teams fail because of a lack of trust, but don’t think it’s necessarily ego-driven.

It’s challenging to build a company with a high-trust culture. While many companies say it’s one of their values, I’d bet it only holds true for a small minority of them in practice, especially when things aren’t going according to plan.

When an organization is failing to execute against its goals, regardless of the root cause, the natural tendency is to introduce more process and exert more top-down control. Ironically, this drives away the most capable, creative problem solvers, who’ll look elsewhere for fulfillment.

> especially when things aren’t going according to plan.

Exactly my experience. The first misstep and it reverts back to top-down micromanagement and the actual product roadmap is the last priority... then it's downhill from there.

> [top down control] drives away the most capable, creative problem solvers [..]

Eh, I think it's the lack of execution that drives them away, in fact if you're not executing many times it's because they're not even there.

Not necessarily ego-driven but in my experience they usually come together. If there was trust, all that would be needed is more communication. Without it reporting teams are not given autonomy. Now if execs issue top-down direction, it's because 'they know better' aka ego, not the kind for collecting wins, but simply believing they know more than those that are closer to the problem and data.

An early stage startup is an empowered product team, I would say. I would never found a company, take on the CEO role, and then hand off responsibility for customer value and business viability to a newly hired “empowered product manager”. That makes no sense to me.

For a later stage company I fully agree with this model though. I tend to think of these “empowered product teams” as sort of internal startups, each with a “mini-CEO” and a “mini-CTO”.

I think some people are talking about startups here and some people are talking about enterprises and it's confusing the issue a bit. Apart from that, I think there's an element of "skin in the game" that benefits startups - there's a natural tendency for people at companies big or small to lose track of the big picture and start working on pet projects. At a startup at least you have a chance of things being aligned, everyone has equity and things are (relatively) simple enough that everyone can sort of tell what needs to be done. But at a big enterprise company, an entire department can spend millions on some pet project before anyone even realizes what's happening, and things are so complex that you can make a reasonable case for anything being a valid bet. And to the people in the department, it will appear that some egocentric executive showed up out of nowhere and disrupted their idea.

In the end, though, I don't think it's really mostly executive ego being inflicted on a group of people, although I am sure that sometimes happens. And I especially don't believe that demonstrating small incremental value will protect you from anything.

I think if you really want to be on an empowered product team, for real, work at startups. But that comes with its own downsides.

all the digital and agile transformations I've seen had 1 thing in common: they missed to get buy in from middle management. Instead there are agile coaches preaching[1] to the choir while the rest of the org is betting against their success.

[1] Art imitating life in that regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB340S0tGf8

You can also have the whole org go all in on agile. I am not sure which way is worse now. But we sure have tons of forms to make sure our rituals are properly done.

Middle management and agile almost seems like a contradiction in terms in the first place. Although I guess that's what SAFe is for.

I would also add buy in from rank and file engineering team members. Also, not being sensitive to concerns of those teams. If you make life hard for folks implementing, they will find loopholes that will eventually crater your plan.

I’ve also seen where upper management dictates those below them to use it, but they want to be exempt from all of it, forcing teams to do double (or worse) work to handle the paperwork around agile, while also preparing bespoke reports to feed up the chain in each leader’s preferred format.

Interesting article but in my company the shifting priorities aren't ego driven, it's driven by the rapidly changing technical requirements of the company. Maybe at Google it was ego but at the startup I work at it's just pivoting to capture market share.

A lot of my peers have trouble with this constant shift and I think that's ego. They are wrapped up in their own work and are ignorant of the company's priorities.

I mean also just adapting to rapidly changing environment and requirement is hard. It's a skill, just like anything else. Best not assign reason to why others have trouble doing a thing (not just this) based on our own experiences (referring to "that's ego" bit).

    > A lot of my peers have trouble with this constant shift and I think that's ego. They are wrapped up in their own work and are ignorant of the company's priorities.

I'd say that it's not necessarily ego but perhaps one part coherency and one part skepticism. And it can often be exacerbated by lack of communication of those priorities and why they are shifting.

If the previous strategy was validated, then why is the strategy shifting? Is the product design process fundamentally broken in the org? "If I dump my in progress work now, how long before my next effort gets short circuited?" Rapidly shifting priorities without clear reasoning raises questions on whether the leadership team knows what they are doing.

In both cases, my own experience is that open dialog and communication from the leadership team on how the decision was made and sharing the data points can reduce the friction. From the technical leadership, communicating the right mindset also helps -- especially with more senior resources.

> Rapidly shifting priorities without clear reasoning raises questions on whether the leadership team knows what they are doing.

It also leads to wasted work. What was the point of of working hard when it gets thrown away?

If alternative views were expressed earlier then perhaps the work could have been made generic to handle both use cases in case of a pivot.

Not just wasted work, but a general understanding that there's no point to working hard, when the work gets thrown away every time.

That's a good rephrasing.

If priorities will change again before you get to ship the new project, you're better off not doing anything and getting ready for the next thing.

Unless, of course, that thing will also be deprioritized, in which case you're better off not doing anything at all.

> The short summary of Cagan’s definitions is that feature teams are told what to do and are measured on delivering output. They’re incentivized to ship products, have low levels of collaboration and almost no autonomy. Product teams, on the other hand, are empowered to solve problems.

Seems like author's product team has quite an ego of itself, having feature team only ship products and not solve or point out problems is a recipe for tech debt and disaster.

The feature team is as a comparison, not in addition to the product team.

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