Organizational Constipation

Why throughput in product companies stalls and what leaders and teams can do about it

Several years ago Mind The Product did a survey on what problems plagued product leaders.

Top of the list was prioritization.

In the 5 years since that survey, not much has changed. On an almost daily basis I hear from my clients that prioritization is painful. If you’re on LinkedIn, you’ll notice a significant number of posts are about getting things done (or not getting things done).

Prioritization is still a big topic of conversation in product teams.

With all the tools and practices we have at our disposal, why is prioritization so difficult? At the core is our greed. Our mouths are too big for our stomaches. We’re stuffing too much into the organizational digestive system.

Here’s the crazy part. When leaders learn they have too much in the system their response it often to come up with a new project to unblock the system. New projects mean new priorities and resource allocation. That’s like complaining of constipation while standing at the buffet and piling up the plate with more food.

In a recent engagement I was told that the client organization would be forming several committees to brainstorm ways to improve the organization’s performance. These things do nothing more than create more distraction from the actual work, so they can create more work, which creates more pressure on getting work done.

I get it, executives are pushing requests down to their teams while customers and sales people are bubbling up requests for custom features and bug fixes. All those requests find their way into the system. Somehow a lot of these requests make it to the backlog.

It’s a sh*t sandwich and it’s hard to say no to executives and customers.

There are a lot of good ways to relieve the organizational constipation but you have to stop eating first. You have to build a culture of saying no in an objective and optimistic way. That starts at the top. It starts upsteam.

To quote Bishop Desmond Tutu, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”

Here’s another in-depth article on saying no.

You can’t treat the problem of organizational constipation by adding. The answer is subtractive. The way to stop eating is to stop putting things in your mouth. Some suggestions for creating a objective (and optimistic) culture of reducing the upstream problems that lead to downstream prioritizations woes (Note: None of these is an elixir that will make your prioritization problems go away, but they will certainly give you the space to make better and less emotional decisions):

• Have a clear product vision to use to filter requests. A company vision includes a mission, a purpose, and principles, a product vision is a description of the problem area and an explanation of how the product solves that problem.
• Agree on your go-to-market strategy (the daily behavior) and align it with the product vision.
• Ideally, have a North Star metric to link the strategy to the daily work.
• Build a visual decision stack that shows how the vision, strategy, GTM and North Star metric all work together to make decisions.
• Use a version of the “health monitor” method to frame conversations about how and why things are in the backlog. Ask the question, does this feel like a positive (healthy) or negative (unhealthy) choice right now?
• Beware of scores, points or weights, as a way to determine whether something becomes prioritized or not. This is because of Goodhart’s Law, which is expressed simply as: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we set one specific measure, people will tend to optimize for that score regardless of the consequences. This leads to problems when we neglect other equally important aspects of a situation.
• Teach your teams to understand trade-offs and opportunity cost. Normalize objective language like, “That’s not aligned with what we’ve already agreed to do” and “What would you like me to stop doing to start doing this new thing?”

The Final Word

All of these things are recommended because they either start conversations, or create the psychological safety for healthy conversations. Conversations are good. They encourage robust debate. Discussions allow teams to understand the why behind decisions. Whatever you prioritization methods you use, consider that:

• Any prioritization system that involves active conversation is probably better than a robotic forcing function or no system,
• and, it makes sense to create something that works for your specific company (in the context and position that you are in) and not simply copy what others are doing.

No system or measure is perfect. In fact, most policy-led systems are designed to prevent free-flowing conversation. Because of that, it’s important to do something that doesn’t simply become a bureaucracy. The problem with having too many rules, scores and policies, is that you leave no room thoughtful conversations. It’s been my experience that eventually a bureaucracy becomes indistinguishable from sabotage.