Managing Product Development

We’re getting ready for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, and my sister decided a scrapbook of family pictures would be a great present. She’s right, it will be wonderful. Mark and I were looking for pictures of us and our children, so we pulled out all of the pictures from the last 20 years. We have great pictures of us before we had children. We have great pictures of the girls with me. We have terrible pictures of Mark and the girls. Why? Because I took them. Some pictures are fuzzy. Some have heads, arms, feet cut off. My favorite is the one of Mark with one child - both people are so fuzzy I can’t tell which child it is and we can only see Mark from his glasses on down. I laughed so hard I cried. We found some pictures of Mark and the girls we can use, so we finished the necessary picture-finding task. But that got me thinking about my picture-taking ability. With film cameras, the feedback I receive on my picture-taking is significantly delayed, so I don’t yet know how to take good pictures. I’m better with an instant-film camera, but I’m hoping a digital camera will teach me to take better pictures. (When I told Mark this, he chortled and told me I was just competing with him for toys.

So what does this amusing anecdote have to do with product development? Everything. The further delayed your feedback is from performing the work, the less you can change about the way you perform your work. If you’re a developer, and you discover problems in your code only once the product is in system test, you don’t have feedback on the design or the implementation early enough to change how you design or code. If you’re a project manager, your decisions at the beginning of the project have a tremendous impact on the end of the project, but unless you set up systems to obtain feedback, you can’t know which decisions had what kind of impact.

No matter what your role is on your project, think about ways you can obtain feedback on your work as quickly as possible.

• Ask for peer review.
• Offer walkthroughs.
• Use the rule of three: what three things can go wrong with this design/test/project plan/whatever it is that you’re working on.
• Look for unanticipated side effects of decisions. (Especially if you’ve started some new measurement to go along with the decisions.)

I’m sure there are more possibilities than these, but the key is to be open to feedback from other people about your work product. The more immediate the feedback, the more likely you are to improve your work product. The more delayed the feedback, the fewer alternatives you see and the more costly the changes are.

In the last two weeks, four different colleagues have found themselves suddenly unemployed, all for the same reason, “You didn’t do what we expected you to. Since your performance is inadequate, we’re firing you.”

My colleagues and I were surprised. Three of the four people received raises and good-to-great performance evaluations in the last six months. The fourth kept hearing “atta-boys” from his boss. So what’s happening?

1. Maybe the manager is giving these people feedback, but in a way they can’t hear it.
2. Maybe these colleagues are suddenly not performing (after 20-25 years at work).
3. Maybe the layoff/firings are not about my colleagues.

Here in Massachusetts, if a company wants to lay off at least 10% of their workforce, they need to file paperwork with the state and let the employees know 30 days in advance. I’m sure there’s more to the law than that, but I’m finding these onesies and twosies layoffs of middle management surprising. If the company makes a series of small layoffs for “performance” reasons, the company doesn’t have to inform the state, doesn’t have to pay severance, and doesn’t have to treat these over-40’s as a protected class. From what I can see, the layoffs/firings are not about my colleagues at all, but about the management performance of their bosses.

Only cowardly managers use performance as an excuse to avoid the perception of layoffs. These unethical managers don’t care if they batter someone’s self-esteem, or make finding a new job difficult. They only care about saving their tushes.

I’m tired of cowardly managers. If you really do want to fire someone because they’re not performing, follow the second rule of feedback:

Give the feedback to the person:

1. State your observations. Make sure the other person agrees with your data.
2. Describe the impact of the person’s lack of performance, explaining the effects on the product, the team, the project…
3. Describe the change you want to see. Be specific. “I’d like to see you complete the whosis task before you take on the whatsis task.”

Real managers, professional managers, competent managers give feedback way before firing is required.

If your company is losing money and you think it’s your employees’ fault, think again. Maybe the real performance problem isn’t your employees. And if the performance problem isn’t your employees, all the onesies and twosies firings for “performance” won’t make a damn bit of difference.

(I’m angry and when I’m angry, I don’t always write well. Please do provide feedback!)