(2023-02-22) When Teams Lie To Themselves They Fall Apart

Pavel Samsonov: When teams lie to themselves, they fall apart. When teams take on a stakeholder request to “build my idea” they stop solving problems together and become a workgroup of individuals producing outputs.

There’s a “design thinking” trick.
In design thinking, you identify a user, find top problems, and then develop solutions. But what if you have a cool solution idea already? Just define the user as “people who have this problem,” and the problem as “users can’t get my solution.”

Product Teams end up having to do this when they are given a feature idea by their stakeholders without any justification beyond “it’s my idea, so you should build it.” Teams still need to “fill out” the other stuff that they are told should be a part of their process (often by the same executives) and end up having to guess what the expected impact of the work will be.

The problems they are solving, and the users they are solving for, don’t exist. The team is, effectively, lying to itself.
And when product teams lie to themselves, they fall apart.

A shared goal is what makes a team.
Fake user stories don’t provide a unifying goal, because they are not solving a real problem.

by taking on the work, the team gives implicit agreement to their executive stakeholder that the work has value and will yield outcomes that justify the time spent working on it. So a goal has to be invented, along with outcomes and metrics

Accountability for those outcomes is passed around like a hot potato. Trust begins to break down as team members try to assign blame for why their work is not impactful.

because there is no real customer problem and no guiding principle to make decisions outside of authority, each role invents problems it alone owns, for itself to solve. Developers focus on technical problems, premature optimization, and resume-driven programming. Designers withdraw from defining the user experience into visual craft and design systems.

Rather than a team working towards a shared goal, these are now individuals satisfying contractual obligations.

the team starts to fall apart. Enthusiasm evaporates, work that used to energize the team becomes draining.