What's a good way to approach decisions that other teams feel they should own vs. Product feels they should own?
I know it sounds obvious, but it's important to have an open and early conversation about decision-making to avoid this becoming a blocker further down the line. You can use a RACI or DACI model to guide these conversations and achieve calarity about who owns a decision. The added benefit of models such as RACI and DACI is that they will help clarify overall responsibilities when working on a product or project.
https://monday.com/blog/project-management/raci-model/
https://www.productplan.com/glossary/daci/
Decision-making and roles and responsibilities around decision-making vary from team to team and company to company, and because of that, you are likely to run into this scenario at some point in your career.
There are several tactics you could take to resolve friction or conflicts like this, below are some examples:
- Understand the Motivation. Dig into this area thoroughly so you get a clear picture of what is motivating their point of view. Understanding the motivation can help you refine your tactic of choice. Is the person used to making this decision and therefore see’s this shift as a scope decrease for their team? Is it a trust issue in which they don’t believe you will make the right choice or the best choice? Do they fear their voice will no longer be heard, and there will be a negative impact on their performance or their teams? Or is it something else?
- Build Bridges - Work on seeing if the two of you or several of you can align on a common decision-making framework to ease the concerns of other stakeholders and give them peace of mind that the variables they care about will be paid attention to.
- The Let’s Try It approach - Offer to test out the new decision framework for a pre-determined amount of time to see if their fears are warranted or if you would have been aligned all along. Cycle back after the trial period to gather any feedback and determine if there is any opportunity to improve the framework.
- Leverage Best Practices and Past Experiences - You can often find sources of insights in a variety of decision-making frameworks. Leverage this to make the case that the current approach is not industry standard or best practice in the industry and that your primary goal is to leverage best practices and industry standards to drive sustainable impact.
- Escalate and Force a Decision - this is the least popular option and you should save it as a last resort after you have attempted at least several of the other solutions first, but it is one you can rely on should things get very messy or contentious.
TL;DR - Align on a framework that helps identify roles & responsibilities
Decision making is often unclear in tech companies due to rapidly changing technology, company culture, complex & interconnected systems and matrixed org structures. This often leads to following challenges:
Conflicts - Complex decisions involving multiple inputs or x-functional partners often lack clear roles and process resulting in conflicts and disagreements
Decision revaluation - When a decision is made, it’s often litigated behind closed doors leading to lack of confidence in decision makers
Protracted decision making - Absence of a consistent approach such as templates or dedicated forums can cause decisions to drag indefinitely
To promote efficient decision making, it is crucial that teams align on a framework that identifies clear roles and responsibilities. There are several popular frameworks that teams can leverage, such as the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) model and the RAPID (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) framework. These frameworks provide structured guidance on assigning responsibilities and involving relevant stakeholders in the decision-making process.
Lastly, having a well-defined framework is important, however, its effectiveness will be determined by execution and application.
Making any discussion data driven helps drive meaningful outcomes. Start with understanding why a different team thinks they own the decision, which helps with your conversation. Given decisions lead to outcomes and hence impact KPIs, leveraging that correlation helps with alignment. Clarifying who owns the KPI, which is impacted by the decision helps identify ownership quickly. Once alignment is reached, always make sure to capture the decision/engagement model as a written artifact for future reference.
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