Some of my most spectacular failures working with teams have come from going deeper than I needed to. One particularly memorable retrospective ended with a product manager declaring, “I’m done talking about my feelings.” (It was not my finest moment.) Yes, organizations are made of people. And yes, work happens inside a container of relationships. But that doesn’t mean every attempt to address a team or organizational problem must be super deep. Choosing the depth at which to intervene is critical for every manager, consultant, and coach.
“I don’t understand products vs. projects. What’s the difference?”
“I don’t want to distract the team. They don’t need to worry about this.” That’s what my boss – the head of engineering at a rapidly growing startup – told me when I asked him how he would share information from top management about our revised expansion plans. His job, he said, was to protect the engineers from things like this and to let them focus on building the product.
The team was angry. Every two weeks, they would find themselves five hours into their sprint planning meeting with no end in sight. Every two weeks, it was the same: Their product manager showed up with a pile of requests the team hadn’t seen before – estimated by someone elsewhere in the organization – and wanted to know precisely how many the team could finish in the next iteration. Everyone hated sprint planning. It was stressful, wasteful, and unproductive. Something had to change.
