Why Radical Transparency is fundamental in building great products.

Why Radical Transparency is fundamental in building great products: Dysfunctional organizations do exist and often, the fatal flaw is the hubris of executives and first-time founders. I don't know how many times I've heard the following statement thrown at me;

"I have been in this industry for 25 years, I know my customer'

Hubris as we know it is an impediment to growth at legacy organizations, studies have found that recourse to hubris as an explanation for organizational failure particular in industries like financial services, and we have seen examples of hubris during the dot-com bubble, in today's landscape, we're faced with inflated valuations, hyper-growth trends where products are developed and released, yet pertain no real business models and are simply not sustainable.

CEOs must lead from the front and engage in a relentless fight against corporate hubris, whether this manifests in greed or most commonly denial of the hard realities of the world.

As Product Owners, we're in this fight too, sometimes with ourselves and or the people around us, our stakeholders.

In my experience, here are the warnings signs of corporate hubris that will eat away at strategy and product development if not kept in check.

Arrogance

Don't mistake confidence for arrogance, recognize if there are egos around you, and if you're the one falling into hubris, keep your own ego in check, being confident is something that means that you have the facts and figures to back your findings, but when you fall into your own ego, arrogance will shine through and that won't win you influence or get productive outcomes. When you're not humble with your opinions and your suggestions, you might start to get in the way of believing your own bias, so trust yourself, but verify.

Misalignment on Strategy

Having a strategy, is a plan and it's better than no plan at all, however, if we're reciting our strategy but actually do not have the means, structure, and commitment to execute them, there is no plan and the plan will result in failure. So avoid telling people what the strategy is if there is no means to execute it.

Creating grandiose strategies that find their way into glossy brochures, new advertising campaigns, and rhetorical conference speeches - but never get implemented. (Fighting Corporate Hubris, BCG)

Inflating & Exaggerating

This decade, we have seen the rise and fall of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, wherein 2003, raised money from private market investors in excess of $700 million, with no real product, business model and a series of false claims about the company's technology, it's business operations, the product, and financial performance. Holmes told everyone, that Theranos had hold of an innovative product that could incite your complete entire health profile, with a single drop of blood, the technology nor the product didn't exist. The people, the media all swooned over the Theranos founder, with pristine editorial coverage on renowned publications as Forbes and Fortune magazine, Holmes was promising. Even Joe Biden, now president of the United States, spoke during a visit to Theranos manufacturing in Newark, California in 2015. Biden toured the facility and took part in round table discussions on health care practices in preventive tech and innovation.

It all took a downturn in 2018, where the Securities and Exchange Commission today charged the Silicon Valley-based private company, its founder, and its president with raising money on the pretense of hyper-inflated value and a product that only did a little bit of what it was meant to do, the biggest mistake, was telling investors in presentations, product demonstrations and release PR new stories where media outlets, were reporting that the company has developed the product to pioneer the medical blood testing industry, the portable blood analyzer, supposedly was able to direct and conduct comprehensive blood tests from finger drops of blood. The pitch was that it can revolutionize the medical industry.

In truth, the product did analyze some and could only complete a small number of tests, however, the company conducted the vast majority of patient tests on modified and industry-standard commercial analyzers that were in fact, manufactured by other organizations and the claims of the product being what is, was misleading, dubious and false and investors went down a rabbit-hole, yet the medical community remained skeptical at large. If there are lessons to learn in product development, stay true to the discovery of the product, its experimentation, and its promise, and whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of being in denial of reality and where your product really is at.

If there is a lesson learnt in developing product and going out to market with it, don't say you have something when you have nothing and if you want to keep your job, don't promise things that just cant be done.

Don't fall for when 'Simon Says...'

When you fall into the pit of what someone else has said, in your organization, you're going to get trapped in design hubris, usually, it's the thinking that they know more than your customers, they are better than them and they are better than their employees, better than you and better than the past.

When founders say 'Just get this feature out, we need this for sales' it's an interpretation in its own form, where the message is 'We're losing sales because we don't have this feature and very often or not, it's rare that a subset of new features are the reason that the organization is going down on revenue and they are not closing deals.

Another good one is 'Our competitor has it, why don't we have it too?', ok so I have mixed feelings about this, often enough features that are scoped out by large big-business have large UX teams and most often, are rarely dysfunctional in feature discovery and they don't skimp on user feedback and usability testing, but sometimes competitors make mistakes. So just because Simon said so, doesn't mean you as a product owner, need to fulfill this, what you need to do is assess the feasibility and ask questions about why it's needed, where is the data to back this.

Whilst cloning and copying the things others have done before you without being critical of the mistakes they discovered in the product journey, can lead to a pattern of future mistakes where you will be distracted from focusing on real-customer problems and just implementing the status quo.

Radical transparency is conducted in several ways, in the form of sharing the company information and from top to bottom, sharing everything. It's a mix of honesty and openness, of telling employees good news and bad news and not trying to hide anything and it requires courage, good communication skills, and the willingness to embrace and engage in open dialogue. In its purest form, radical transparency has no secrets, but companies often yet find it challenging how much do we tell our people, what does the transparency lever or spectrum looks like, and radical transparency, in itself, is 'radical' so, a shakeup can often lead to efficiency in operations and the development of mutual trust and loyalty between the organization and its employees. How it's done can be rapid and often painful for those that don't want it, but when it's done to a dysfunctional organization, it creates a culture where the engagement of healthy disagreement is accepted. Best known for his works, Ray Dalio explains implementations and thinking around Radical Transparency in his book Principles: Life and work, where he says

' I want independent thinkers who are going to disagree'

As a product owner, embark on your journey of product discovery and figuring out the pain points of your customers, applying radical transparency in your work and what customers say will lead you to practice being honest and drawing a clear line of addressing its problems.

In some organizations, it's an uphill battle for you to decide, the willingness to have thoughtful disagreements may be something you want, whilst others will not have the courage to do and that's ok, in time if nurtured, it might get there. If in your organization Radical transparency or transparency at all, it's not receptive, don't make the mistake I made with sticking to it, can I impact this change, in my team and with my stakeholders? Am I ready to do so? That decision will only be from you.

Key Takeaways I had the pleasure to ask Mirza Salman Hossain Beg, on Linkedin to share his insights on the topic of Product managers, the importance of customer interviews, and overcoming dysfunctional organizations.

"If you really want to build a great product and hopefully turn that into a great business, make sure to have your calendar blocked for customer interactions every other week, if not more. " - Mirza Salman Hossain Beg

'Dysfunctional organizations do exist and often, hubris is the fatal flaw for many executives and first-time founders, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard we know our customer line thrown at me, when there has been no qual or quant research, sometimes it’s an impeding blocker at legacy organizations, and may even cost you your job as a Product Owner or Product Manager. Can you share your advice on how PO/PMs can overcome this?

Mirza Salman Hossain Beg

'That's a very good reflection, Sarah Huang. I don't think there is a silver bullet here to protect a functional product team from a dysfunctional legacy leadership and organization. I've seen many times, the good ones move out to find respite'

If I could share 3 things that can mitigate these challenges early on, they would be-

1.Radical transparency should be the core guiding principle for any customer-centric organization/team, if not all. This creates the right holding environment to be wrong (whether a leader or a junior team member) and without any unfortunate consequences

2. Establishing a cadence from day 0. This creates a more expressed accountability and establishes governance.

3. Finally, I think PMs should always uphold the single truth and fight for it. Having dumb decision-makers and poor leadership is part of navigating in careers, I guess. Having strategic allies to support a PM to upload her values can easily evade such unwanted interferences.

Thanks to VP, Head of Innovation at Telenor, Mirza Salman Hossain Beg, I was able to get his take on how to overcome the challenges in organizations where radical transparency is a miss.

Ultimately a company and its product team will thrive only if it offers differentiated products or services to customers and deliver them well, where fostering open communication and an inquisitive culture where asking questions is encouraged. To remain in check of consistently practicing empiricism, transparency, inspection, adaptation to deliver value.

Don't be a magician, Stay true to the customers' folks, and be transparent.