Some meetings where the designers aren’t opining on the financial modelling or the product managers aren’t suggesting a migration strategy to Redis
Consequences
Groupthink means your product will be mid
If people are wasting time on managing conflicting opinions instead of deeply solving problems, the result will be shallow solutions
Anything ‘special’ will be sanded away in favour of a norm
Just like users, you won’t please all stakeholders and will produce mediocrity by trying
If your product is mid, someone else will solve the problem better. You lose users and your jobs
If the whole company sat around picking the best font or something, you burn time
Specialists are most productive in their specialism, if everyone is spens all their time in discussion / planning, nobody’s working
If the trust in each other’s specialism isn’t there and you’re also spending time justifying the choice of button colour to the finance team, you’re wasting more time
Waste enough time that you move slowly enough to have your lunch eaten, nobody has jobs
At the very least, a sense of entitlement arises which is just fucking annoying to deal with and wastes time
Causes
Within product, some smartass got hurt by waterfall and decided the antidote was that everyone does everything all at once because everyone’s opinions on every stage are as needed as everyone else’s
At a company level, when a silo’d product team went and yeeted something into prod without consulting non-product stakeholders. A ‘never again’ moment happened and it was mandated that lawyers and HR sit in code reviews.
Approaches
Recognise when upstream mistakes lead to knee-jerk overcorrections
Acquaint everyone (including the specialist doing the work) on the consequences of not having deep thought
Obviously if pairing makes sense, pair up. This is a much bigger problem at the refine and design stage than execution
If you’ve hired good people, remind everyone that they are good people and to have the stones to stand by their work
If you’ve created a toxic environment where nobody has the confidence to do truly extraordinary work, the work will be extra ordinary
If you’ve got an auteur whose tastes must be appeased for anything to pass review, make sure those tastes really are best for the company