#3: On The Power of Ownership and the Joys Of a Well Written Document
The Power of Ownership: Teams are More Motivated to Build Out Their Own Ideas
A few months ago, the lead engineer of my team at Emeritus reached out to me to suggest we do a significant restructuring of our user experience. His reasons were: a) it would make the code-base more maintainable; b) it would enable faster development of future features; c) improve performance; d) enhance the user experience. The main motivations were engineering focused with the additional benefit of improving UX.
Initially, I was hesitant, as our backlog and roadmap were already full of high-priority items with a clear business impact. To prioritize something like this at a time when the company was focused on profitability didn’t seem feasible. However, couple weeks later, I found myself testing the entire user flow and realized the merit of the potential UX improvements. I decided to consider the project with the goal of increasing conversion rate by simplifying the user experience. The challenge now was how we would fit it in given the rest of the priorities. On talking with the team, I realized they were incredibly motivated and excited about this project - and they came up with a much smaller estimate for the size of work than I’d expected. They got creative with implementation and pushed through to deliver it in a very short span of time.
This was a situation where an engineer brought an idea which turned out to be a great enhancement for simplifying user experience - and, the team being more motivated and feeling a stronger sense of ownership, was able to deliver fast.
A key learning I got from this is that teams are far more motivated to work on something when they feel like it’s their idea. And this extra motivation and excitement can bring significant velocity gains, creativity and faster execution.
Teams are far more motivated to work on something when they feel like it’s their idea. This extra motivation and excitement can bring velocity gains, creativity & faster execution.
What does this mean?
Listen to engineers’ ideas and consider them seriously.
If the idea is coming from you/Product team; try to make it feel like it’s theirs.
This is not about deceit or playing any psychological tricks. It’s about giving a greater ownership and motivation as opposed to shoving a feature description down their throat; more of sharing the Why behind the project. Most PMs will write about the problem and user needs in their Product Requirements Documents and perhaps even talk about the why at the project kickoff meeting. But if you can go the extra mile to really drill down in the team’s mind the problem(s) being solved & the value being created by the project - those efforts are 100% worth it.
~Joys of a Job Well Done, a Doc Well-Written~
Have you ever been in a situation where you had conviction about a product decision, only to face opposition from cautious stakeholders? I was in such a situation recently.
I knew going into it that this new feature was going to be controversial because of concerns over edge cases in user behavior, and just general hesitation regarding the change in internal process that this feature would bring about. In anticipation, I wrote up a document making a clear case with data about the need for this feature and, crucially, addressing all potential questions and concerns I could anticipate (I literally added an “FAQ” section with over 10 questions in it).
I sent it over to stakeholders - based on past experiences with “risky” features, I was fully expecting push-back and requests for a meeting to discuss. But instead I got unanimous agreement and excitement about the feature, minus a few small clarifying questions.
Sounds like a small win but it saved me a lot of time. As someone who’s done a fair bit of blogging and creative writing, it feels similar to the high of writing well - when you know what you’ve said has resonated (or in this situation, successfully persuaded stakeholders and addressed all their concerns).
What I Read This Week
As always, if you have any reactions, thoughts, feedback on anything I shared today, feel free to write back here.
Until Next Time,
Manan
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