PRODUCTHEAD: When empowerment is a façade

climbing up the products #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

Defend against short-termism by making your team’s strategic thinking visible

People are increasingly working to live, not living to work

Teams should only split their Decision Stack when their answers to “How?” diverge

Repetition and reward are intrinsic to behaviour change in teams

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hello

This week Janna Bastow writes about the signs of fake empowerment. You’ll have experienced this when whatever happens to be top of mind for senior management today displaces any semblance of long-term strategy. When this occurs with regularity, teams stop thinking creatively and start playing it safe, commencing the downward spiral into mediocrity. To combat this, Janna suggests that product teams should make their strategic thinking visible. Sometimes showing your working, reasoning and trade-offs will reassure the powers that be that there is, in fact, progress.

Continuing with the positive vibes, Alex McCann writes about the dying corporate role, observing that many professionals are engaged in elaborate performance art, playing the role at work, but ultimately creating nothing of substance or meaning. He suggests that many people are using their corporate presence and predictable salary as a way to fund a side hustle they actually care about.

Martin Eriksson tackles the question of when and how individual teams should diverge in their strategies when a single Decision Stack isn’t going to work for all. He suggests this should happen when teams genuinely offer different answers to the “How?” question, rather than splitting based purely on the organisational chart. However, it shouldn’t be a complete break, with some unifying aspects retained for alignment.

And to finish this week, Ash Maurya draws heavily on Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit to write about how helps product teams to create and reinforce better working habits through reward and repetition. It’s worth reading DuHigg’s book also.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

So much for empowerment

Empowerment.

It’s one of those words that shows up everywhere. Mission statements. Offsites. Pep talks. We all nod along. But when the pressure’s on, when a launch date is creeping up, a customer is shouting, or a CEO is waving a feature list, who actually gets to pause and think long term?

Show your working

[Janna Bastow / LinkedIn]

The death of the corporate job.

Last week, I had coffee with someone who works at a big consulting firm. She spent twenty minutes explaining her role to me. Not because it was complex, but because she was trying to convince herself it existed. “I facilitate stakeholder alignment across cross-functional workstreams,” she said. Then laughed. “I genuinely don’t know what that means anymore.”

Everyone’s masking at work now

[Alex McCann / Still Wandering]

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Does Every Team Need a Separate Strategy? When to Split Your Decision Stack

Here’s a question that divides every leadership team: “Should this team have its own strategy?” Every time this comes up, the room splits into “everything cascades from the top” traditionalists and the “every team needs autonomy” advocates.

Both are wrong. And both are right.

Differing detail, but shared vision

[Martin Eriksson / The Decision Stack]

Using Behavior Design to Trigger Mindset Change in Product Teams

We are living in a new world where the way we build products has fundamentally changed. Succeeding in this new world requires learning new ways and unlearning old ways.

Therein lies the challenge.

Eat, sleep, reward, repeat

[Ash Maurya / LEANSTACK]

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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from smooth, square blocks of oak.