Step Aside! You’re stifling Innovation!
PMs may be the bottleneck for innovation in their team. Stop the choke!
On the episode “Stay Creative” of the podcast “Think Fast, Talk Smart” by the brilliant Matt Abrahams (Matt Abrahams), the guest speaker, Justin Berg, talks about how creativity flows in an organization. The entire episode is filled with amazing, thought-provoking content and I encourage you to give it a listen.
What struck me in the episode was how creators & managers assess their ideas and the ideas of their peers. Turns out, managers are relatively bad at evaluating ideas from creators. Creators tend to rate their ideas higher but are much better than managers at evaluating their peers’ ideas. The core thinking at play is simple:
Creators can identify novelty in the ideas because they spend a lot of time creating ideas. Managers spend more time evaluating ideas than in creating ideas. Thus, their evaluation of novelty is biased by their need for usefulness.
Bringing this back into product management and our team inter-play, think about the last time the team surfaced an idea to you. You would have thought about reasons why it will be unsuccessful, instead of why it might be successful, especially if you’ve spent months on the product. You are more likely to discourage the idea simply because you have to balance out the teams’ development time and delivery.
And I think that’s wrong.
If you refer to your SCRUM guide, you’ll see that it talks about empirical knowledge — like you, the team has spent time in understanding & building the product. They are the creators of the product, you only provide the vision. That empirical knowledge is not only for better estimation but stands to be a source for your backlog.
Innovation is a gamble — you have to try out 100 different ideas before you find one that gives you a hockey stick growth.
So, if you’re running your team like a feature churning factory, you’ll always have to make do with tiny gains with no real improvement in the metrics. Worse, if your…