I Designed A Silo

I have a group exercise in the Product Strategy workshop. I sort people into groups with a mix of product managers, engineers, and designers in each group. Each group gets a semi-completed product strategy of two distinct but dependent products. The goals of the breakout are for the teams to understand the strategy of the product they are assigned, and then finish exercises to define bets and experiments, success metrics, and manage a difficult stakeholder.

I have run a version of this exercise multiple times, and each time a surprising thing happens. No one walks over to the other group to discuss the dependency that is obviously mentioned in the strategy. I have been thinking about why that is happening.

We see this everywhere in our daily work dynamics. We are consumed by the ‘us vs. them’ mentality that we don’t notice the system we are operating in. Sometimes what we do, how we behave, and the questions we ask are exactly what the system is designed for. In an unintentional system, people see what gets rewarded and behave that way.

In the workshop, no one walked over because I designed an exercise that rewarded staying within the group. Each team owned a strategy. Each team got points for finishing the template, defining bets, setting metrics, and navigating their stakeholder. The system had no explicit instructions to discuss the dependencies with the other team. Crossing over wasn’t asked for and wasn’t rewarded, so rational participants stayed in.

This goes back to my thesis on enabling constraint, that our system design intentionally or not invokes a desirable or undesirable behavior. The workshop exercise simulates the system most teams operate in, where the coordination prompts are not explicitly defined. Teams discuss these in stand-ups and planning ceremonies.

We need to create an ‘empowered’ system where these prompts are not needed, and the system makes it obvious with clear contracts, accountability, and an environment that encourages the right behavior.

Next time I run the exercise, I’ll add a coordination prompt. The default behavior in any system tells you what the system is optimizing for.

What’s your system designed to do?