When a product manager shows up to work their first week, one of the first things they encounter is a sense of the culture and processes that drive their organization.
Where do product ideas come from? How are ideas captured and prioritized? How much do we focus on competitors? How does the team do research and discovery?
How do PMs work with designers, developers, and functional counterparts on the customer side (sales, marketing, CX, support, etc.)? Who has the most influence?
How do teams build and share their roadmaps?
How do people write PRDs (Product Requirements Document)? What kinds of content do they use to communicate their point?
Who speaks up in meetings? How do people tiebreak larger disagreements? How are decisions captured and shared?
In a small organization, you’ll tend to notice one dominant culture, usually driven by the CEO and founders. Oftentimes, you’ll notice that they’ve borrowed from past experiences (note: I do this all the time) at other companies. It’s easy to notice when they worked at Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix or any large company with a distinct, well-documented set of practices. OKRs, 20% time, Bias for Action, Customer Obsession, Move Fast and Break Things, RFCs; you know what I’m talking about.
When you work with larger companies, starting at around 100-300 employees, you’ll notice a dominant culture and a handful of sub-cultures. In organizations with thousands or tens of thousands of employees, the company-level culture is less hegemonic, and people tend to pick up the culture of their business unit or product line.
As an individual contributor, I saw a fair share of executives try to wrangle sub-cultures and tame variability in processes with heavy-handed initiatives. Think of the classic one-size-fits-all Release Process, or the giant 300-slide powerpoint that has everyone’s roadmaps in it.
You might think these people are grossly misguided. But as a manager and leader of product organizations, it’s very humbling when you’re on the other side of this situation.
You’ll be reviewing work from your subordinates.
A lot of it will be good work.
But some of it will bother you.
It’s not how you would have done it.
And if you’re tired, impatient, or stressed out, you might find yourself taking a heavy hand and trying to intervene too much.
And sometimes you have to, because you’re coaching someone and they can learn a better way.
Sometimes you have to, because the work is important and it’s going to reflect upon you and your team to outside stakeholders.
And sometimes, you overstep and you smother the fire.
That person on your team was doing their best.
They were trying something different that worked for them.
Or maybe they know something you don’t know, and they’re onto something new.
But next time, they’ll be a little more cautious.
They don’t want to fight with you. It’s not worth it.
As a leader, so much of your job is to manage the energy of your team. I find that it’s helpful to think about two key forces that you can direct: Imitation and Defiance.
Imitation is how your team learns best.
People see how others work, the work product, the quality, and they learn how to copy and tweak things for themselves.
When someone shows up to work at Apple or Dyson, they don’t need to read a book about product quality, they can see it everywhere around them.
That’s why it’s key for junior employees to have plenty of good examples of great work. You don’t want to be wasting calories trying to figure out the process from scratch and solve the problem at hand. I encourage teams to keep a Museum of Excellence where they share exemplary work: great presentations, great designs, great PRDs, great customer interactions.
You start by playing covers, then you learn to improvise.
Besides sharing great work, it’s also important for leaders to observe some of the natural variability across their team and curate conversations and relationships between people who should connect. This channels the power of imitation towards up-leveling your organization. The most adaptive genes proliferate, and best practices diffuse throughout the team.
Equally important, if not greater, is how you handle defiance within your organization.
What I mean here is—what happens when someone breaks the rules? And who is allowed to break them?
When someone breaks the rules, is it because they simply resent authority or can’t follow instructions, or is it because they’ve found a flaw that warrants a different approach?
In every organization, there are people who break the rules, and it’s your job to figure out which ones are going to ultimately help redefine the standard.
Defiance is like a mutation. Sometimes, it’s maladaptive. Sometimes, it’s a breakthrough.
But the ideas with the highest fitness don’t always win, just like adaptive mutations don’t always pass on. They need to be communicated effectively to spread (think sexual selection over natural selection), which is where you come in. As a leader, you can amplify these new ideas and exploit the power of imitation to help them spread.
In Japanese martial arts, there is a concept called “Shuhari” to describe the stages of mastery.
- Shu: to protect / obey. The student faithfully follows the rules, techniques, and traditions laid down by the master or the system. This phase focuses on absorbing the fundamentals without deviation or personal interpretation.
- Ha: to detach. After mastering the basics, the student starts to break away from rigid adherence to the rules. They begin to experiment with adaptations or variations. This phase represents innovation, as the student starts to develop their own style and approach, while still respecting the tradition.
- Ri: to leave. The student transcends both the rules and the techniques. They are now able to operate freely, having internalized the essence of the discipline.
Many of the best product leaders broke the rules to get where they are today. The rules you see around you, the processes, the culture—they are a synthesis of imitation and mutation by the people who came before you.
A bit cliché, but Steve Jobs said it best: “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.“
Next time you see someone on your team color outside the lines: pause, take a breath, and ask yourself the question—”what if they are right?” (and if they’re not right this time, what if they are next time?)