The one big challenge in product development is that there are always so many ideas and so little time! Or so they say. The far bigger challenge is that we're all humans, with our own ambitions, biases, strengths, egos, and flaws — all the things that make us our amazing and wonderful selves.
At commerce tools, we believe that no matter how well established your processes and methodologies are, you can only be successful if you set up your organization for people, and not for cogs in a machine. We are a true”humanocracy” (human centric org), intentionally seeking to spark off everyone's human potential.
Just like the biological model tells us we are powerless to our genetics, old school companies with obsolete practices have created fixed work environments where people are conditioned to act within restricted boundaries. But new sciences like epigenetics tell a different story. They highlight how our behaviors and environmental factors can change our gene expression or how our genes work.
Why shouldn't this be the case for organizations as well? We've done it. We've organically built our own core environmental elements and principles ceaselessly and positively altering our “collective genes” and helping us be and do better together. Here is how:
Different from traditional companies, where product and technology argue over sparse development time and roadmap space, we — Product Managers, UX and Tech — have a collaborative approach and use everyone's skills and expertise to determine what brings the most value — for a MACH architecture product in a fast growing companytech, growth, UX, and features all contribute!
- The product side brings the knowledge about customer value, user satisfaction, and market potential doubled down by the right methodologies to prioritize.
- Technology leadership has a deep understanding of the value that brings architectural, security and technological advancement.
- Engineering leadership and agile coaches contribute with their knowledge of organizational design, process and tool improvements, plus give answers to the challenges of building and nurturing engineering teams.
The different skills, relevant experiences and motivations are the reason why on all levels of the organization, tech, product, engineering and agile coaches are better together — we need each other, and cannot succeed in isolation and silos.
Sometimes the topics we work on can be complicated. That's why we have a group of internal experts and advisors. Principal Engineers consult on technology and drive technology or initiatives, Principal UX and Market / Competitive Intelligence help on UX and product value topics, and Business & Leadership Coaches support and guide organizational change and leadership practices.
We are mindful of our own limitations and create space for everybody's strengths to shine. The close collaboration deepens the respect for areas we would otherwise know nothing about, and with that, our respect for the people working in them.
At the same time, working at the edge of our abilities as individuals or teams — where we're neither over-competent or complacent nor overwhelmed — allows us to build a work environment where our skills and what we know can exist in sheer harmony with the challenges of the unknown. We're constantly optimizing our internal seesaw to balance our knowing, being, and working together.
Our strong collaboration doesn't stop at prioritizing. Feasibility assessment and delivery are also a team effort. The team discusses whether they are set up for successful delivery and commit to deliverables together and unanimously. We're not a process-driven company. We are a team-driven organization with an outcome driven mind. We are focused on how to create value together as opposed to pushing out features as fast as we can.
We follow the same pattern for all important decisions, on all levels. Whether it's about how we restructure our organization while growing, interviewing candidates for key positions, or deciding on ways of working within a team:
- CTO, CPO, Director of Tech Leadership, VP Product, and Head of Agile Coaches work together as equal peers on high-level goals for the product & organization.
- Head of Products, Head of Engineering, Staff Engineers and Product Managers, and Lead Agile Coaches do the same on the product group level.
- Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and Agile Coaches do the same on the team level.
Truly listening to others' ideas and thoughts and practicing the discipline of dialogue is not only important to make better decisions and produce extraordinary results. It also reminds us every day that the truth is more than just our own mental model of the world and makes us aware of the biases and assumptions we may have. Only then can we access authentic and earnest “thinking together.”
It isn't easy to speak up and share a different point of view from what others said. As humans, we want to fit in and earn the approval of others while avoiding being shunned and “sentenced to unworthiness.” At commercetools, we work on giving people an environment of trust and blamelessness and actively encourage dissenting opinions. Not only does it make discussions more interesting, but it also helps us not to get stuck in an echo chamber, where the most prominent idea gets reinforced and never challenged. A good conversation is one where everybody walks away with a new perspective.
For commerce tools, the product is front and center. There are a lot of colleagues who rely on us to deliver not only a product but also transparency about where we are, what we're up to next, and why sometimes not everything is running perfectly. We take the time to build our information architecture and have many ways to share what we know, from real quick status meetings to product demos and retrospectives.
This transparency is only possible because there is no need to hide even uncomfortable truths. We know that all teams want to do good, and when things don't go as planned, everybody chimes in to help and remove roadblocks. We have each other's backs, regardless of reporting lines or which team someone is on. This leads to being rewarded when you share that you have a problem instead of being punished and reinforces the behavior of communicating openly and often. And that's how we engage everyone in the company and foster and encourage a culture of continuous participation and empowerment.
In postmortems (those are retrospectives we do whenever something bad happens, for example, a bug in production), we are just as open and transparent. The goal here is not to identify opportunities for short-term solutions but to learn through reflection and aim to get better as a team.
Another area where we don't hide is feedback and career conversations. Reflect on yourself, reflect on your colleagues, and share your criticism, feelings, appreciation, and expectations. Behind this is a strong belief that we can trust each other to be treated fairly, respectfully, and accepted as we are — and coached and guided to become better versions of ourselves every day.
We are big fans of liminal spaces (from the Latin term “limen,” which means threshold). In architecture, they describe all corridors, hallways, and in-between areas that connect one space to another. In our daily work matters, liminality is the term describing all of our in-between mental spaces that help us transition across all sorts of boundaries and borders: the comfort of the familiar and the thrill of the unknown, the supposedly untouchable territories of our domains to new opportunities of interconnecting them. We have found our liminal spaces, our daily thresholds we deliberately cross so we can be and build better together.
We don't know everything, but everyone knows something. We are the sum of all parts, and while each part — Product, UX, Internal Experts, Tech — has a well-defined area of practice and impact, we are stronger, wiser, and nimbler when we unite our domains, minds, and hearts and work together.
We listen to each other and to our own thoughts. While we may have one great purpose, we are more than one voice. We actively listen to each other and ensure everyone has the time and space to express themselves. We avoid echo chambers and aim to elevate our perspectives and learn.
We don't hide and we show up even when it's hard. We have created a safe space where the hard truth and the uncomfortable facts can be shared with candor. We don't hide; we reflect. We don't keep it to ourselves, we communicate openly and involve everyone.
0 Comments