Arguing Agile

AA227 - Tired of Repeating Yourself? Fixing Broken Communications!

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 227

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In this episode of Arguing Agile, Brian and Om explore the frustrating reality of constant repetition in leadership roles. They discuss why product managers, agile coaches, and team leads find themselves saying the same things over and over - and what to do about it. 

We explore:
• Why repetition is actually part of a leader's core job
• How to transform repetition into reinforcement
• How the global attention crisis affects workplace communication 
• Creating single sources of truth and communication contracts 
• The hidden costs of poor organizational alignment 
• Practical strategies to reduce unnecessary repetition 

Whether you're dealing with stakeholders who don't listen, teams that forget decisions, or an organization drowning in information overload, this episode is packed with tips to improve your communication effectiveness. 

#LeadershipCommunication #ProductManagement #OrganizationalEffectiveness

REFERENCES
Arguing Agile 225: The Team That Got You Here - Navigating Growth and Team Evolution
Arguing Agile 211: Communication is Product's Only Job, Or Is It?
Arguing Agile 201: Mastering Stakeholder Communication and Management
Arguing Agile 198: Better Communication - Mastering Crucial Conversations

LINKS
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@arguingagile
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596
Website: http://arguingagile.com

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

welcome back to Arguing Agile. So om I think leadership is within the realm of the scope of this podcast. And every leader they have this feeling like you, you just explain the strategy, you just explain the big picture. You did it Friday at the, at the call with everyone on the call, and then come Monday afternoon, everyone's looking at you like, what language you speaking? What, what are we doing? So I've been given some coaching advice. That's right. I have another coach that I talked to. He says as the product manager, you are the chief repetition officer. Your job is to keep repeating the message over and over again until people get it. Or until people, I, I guess start ignoring me.'cause that's, that's what I find as a takeaway. I don't think, I don't think that's what he meant. That's what I'm saying. You can say that again. That would repeating, wouldn't it? I need some, I need some coaching for the coach. That's why I am here coaching for the coach. That's right. I think you had me when you said on Friday the strategy was discussed, and then on Monday people are lost as to what that was. Like. How many people are really even participating actively Are you saying that people don't listen? They listen. They just don't listen actively. They multitask often if they're not on camera or even if they are they hear, but they may not listen fodder for a different podcast. Right. Just because the sound waves are hitting your eardrum doesn't mean you're actually comprehending what the heck being communicated you maybe you're just being spoken to. This whole topic came about because we're talking about. Repeating and whether that should be, whether we should look at eliminating that, like why is that happening, et cetera. One of the biggest thing is you have to differentiate. Is it the message that's not being understood or is it the messenger that's not being understood? We have both right at work, right? If you've worked at, if for any length of time we have offshore teams, we have the tyranny of distance, the time zone differences, et cetera. So yes, there is a possibility that you could have a mix of all of the above, right? And so I think during the course of this podcast, we will try to see where some of these things lie. And, but we have to start with a premise. And that is, you really don't wanna repeat yourself because you've already said something once, maybe twice. And when I say repeat, I don't mean having to say it the second time. Okay having to say it over and over and over again to the point where it becomes annoying. let's dig into the core concepts of the podcast. Point number one is repetition, is actually it's part of the core job of leadership. Like if you have, whether you have leaders or managers or whatever the titles are of your organization, it doesn't really matter for what we're talking about today. We'll just say like, the people that are leading the business, what, whatever job titles they may have and whatever sort of organizational structure you have reputation is, it's just built into their job. Like, that that is the job rather than, rather than looking at it from the perspective of, boy, I'm already leaning into the, like my arguing side of the podcast, rather than saying like, well. The product manager in me want that, like very much values my time and doesn't want to get stuck in like meetings that are not valuable to me. And I try to defend my time as much as possible so I have some work time versus time to inform other people the time to get ahead versus time to advance the message. Because there could be some people in the business that will say, well Brian, if you have to repeat the same thing over and over again, if you have to keep pitching your roadmap it's not a pitch deck. So if you have to keep pitching it, that is a failure on you to be like, you're not communicating well enough. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard like, well Brian, that just sounds like you're not communicating well enough. I'm like, I don't know. Like, I think the other side of that is, the product manager part of your job is there's this sales element slash alignment element where you are, you're a constant hype man. Or woman for your, for your product. You constantly, you're trying to get buy-in, right? Constantly yeah. So, so things like roadmap, things like that, you're trying to get buy-in from everybody and it's like so critical that everyone is quote unquote aligned. So if you've ever been in a meeting that's titled an alignment meeting or a sync, that just means that you are already not aligned, right. And, and it's needed. Whether it's you, yourself putting that on the calendar or you're just subject to somebody else's meeting invite so I think there's two things that come to mind right away here one is, why is it such a problem? If you need to repeat the message one more time just to make sure that everyone is on the same page, why is that such a problem? That's one thing. I'll come back to that. The second thing is, is there a limit? You say, well, I've already done this eight times. So what is that? Is it eight? Is it three? Is it four? Right. So the second point really is around the messenger, explaining the message clear enough, and then getting some kind of a signal back that it was received, how it was intended to be received. So let me, you gonna play this back to me? No, I, I'm gonna play it back to you because that is another technique you use, right? You gave, you gave me too strong, you gave me two strong points to actually you kinda gave me a four. And again, so like, on one hand why not do this? On the hand of like, why not do this? Like the, I'm thinking, I'm thinking of like, sorry, I'm trying to take the side of like, the worst people I've worked for in my career right now. They'll be like, if you keep repeating the same thing, that means that you're like it's like, the phrase you ever meet someone that says a lot, even sometimes in the puck, I say a lot the popular like thing will say , if you say you know, after everything, it means, , it's a trigger to mean you are not sure if the other person is bought into what you're saying. Absolutely. So it's like, it's like this, like nervous tick that you're not confident the, I don't know if I really believe any of this, I have heard this before. So on one hand they'll say, well, people aren't really bought into your message, but you keep repeating it. If you have to continually repeat what you're saying, it actually signals., That your systems for distributing information is broken. Whether that system is like slack messages or once a week town halls or whatever, however you distribute the information, like whatever your communication conduits are, they are not working. So I would like, I'm gonna ascribe this as like a personal failing to you of like, oh, Om the product manager. He keeps telling people every week that he's working on this thing and he's trying to get buy-in and draw up support that just, that's an indicator that maybe he doesn't know what he's doing or maybe he's a poor communicator. That, that was one side of what you just said. The other side of what you just said I interpreted as my current role is like this in product management, I talk to a bunch of different audiences that basically represent a bunch of different customers. Like slightly, maybe not exactly the same ICP, like the ideal customer profile or, or if you're doing like customer personas, like persona development, they're not exactly the same persona. They're slightly different personas. And I like to try my message against those different personas, like my pitch to see what works and what doesn't, because I will then next person I talk to, I'll change my pitch slightly. Yeah. Because eventually I'm pitching something that everyone's like, that's Brian, that's your, if we could do that, we would change the industry. And when I get that reaction, I know I have honed my pitch to exactly the right thing... I started about arguing against, and now I'm arguing for to say like, look, I'm like, the more I repeat it, the better I get at my pitch. And if we can start with an internal audience and then refine the pitch to be like, pretty sharp and then move that to an external audience, and now we're like, scalpel sharp. That's the way to do it in product. You're product management, sales, business leadership, all rolled into one at that point. That's what you, that's where you wanna get to which was your for Yes. In this category so starting with that one first, I'm gonna go back to the other one. What you've just described is iterating the message. over and over again until there is a sharper focus. It incrementally you're getting there and once you have some comfort that everyone seems to be aligned on the same page, et cetera, you now feel safe to take that message external. Right?. Perfectly valid. So what you're doing really is you are not just simply making sure that all the recipients of the message understand the message and ascribe to it and agree with it. you are also getting confirmation on your side that you've got the message detailed enough lucid enough where people can understand it. Mm-hmm. And that's important before you go external, right? Because when you go external, you have different perspectives. Now all those personas you mentioned, different levels of consumers of your product, right? Yeah. Even if they're like tangential beneficiaries of the product. So it's important to tricky here, there's two parts to this, right? One is some people will repeat the same message over and over, so they're not moving the goal it's the same goal stated differently. Tailored perhaps to the audience, but the goal doesn't change. And that's great because now you're saying let's all align to that one goal, right? It's like in battle it's important to have a war plan. Similar, the other side of it, however, and this is tricky, I have seen this done very well, and I've seen it done very, very poorly, which is more commonly the case where the message gets pitched at a certain level, and then with each incremental repetition, the message actually gets twisted a little bit. So a lot of people won't even pay regard to that, where I've seen it done really well is that was on purpose. Okay. Because that first pitch was, was never going to land, right? Okay. So it was on purpose that they pitched it such, where the boomerang doesn't come back to you, it's. Over there in your neighbor's yard. And then they change it. And they change it. I've seen it done really, really well. The person that, that I saw pull this off extremely well in the public eye as well, was the chairman of British Airways years and years ago. But he had this knack of how to do that, right? Where whenever he spoke there was everyone's listening the press. Everyone is a public company at the time. So he would say something and there'd be a little bit of ums and ahs, and then he would locate, locate that, and the next time he would say, as I told you before. Yeah. But then whatever happened after that was never exactly what he had said before. Mm-hmm. But it was close. Mm-hmm. But it was, it was far enough apart where he's kind of wedging it towards the direction that he wants to take it that's the well done instance, right. Where it's not so well done is that the person thinks he's saying the same thing as before, but they're actually not. And that's terrible because it's confusing for the recipients too yeah. What do you think about my zinger where I say, well, repe repetition builds culture? I think repetition builds a greater acceptance of the message. One thing that happens when you repeat more than the second or third time is the dissenters will come out and start to push against those messages. Mm-hmm. They may not initially for various reasons, they think they understand what you're saying and they agree with it, or. They think they understand, they don't agree. They're just gonna wait till they have solid enough grounds to come back to you with something so with repetition, you've allowed them that time and you've allowed them to consume the same message in different ways. So now they can push back and say, but what about X? What about y? I think over time it does give you greater alignment, right? It's sort of like using an envelope that's lost it's, or a stamp actually is a better example that's lost it stickiness. But there is a point where you repeat yourself too often, right? We're gonna get to that in a separate arguing point. So, I like your take on both of these. At some point when the descent comes out and you've worked your way through that, assuming you've done your homework. That's where I'm going with this. It becomes reinforcement, not repetition. Correct. That's a big difference when you hone your message I'm not saying that your message can't change, you need to hone your message to the point where it becomes reinforcement, and that's how this stuff can build culture. So the takeaway in this category, if you're saying like, well what does, what does this even mean? Is start tracking. When you have like little quips through the day where you say a certain thing start tracking how many times you say that. First of all, like it's on a sticky, it doesn't have to be anything formal or whatever. Like put a little tick on a sticky, I'm trying to think of a quip that I would say on a regular basis. Oh, heroes don't build great software. Teams build great software. You know what I mean? Like, no one individual, it's it's teams when it comes to corporate, if you're like a solopreneur or like a startup or whatever, like I can totally get on board with like, oh yeah, it's all one single person at the startup. But when you get to a company level where you have like multiple people or whatever, it's probably not one person. It's probably a team. Like teams build great solutions. There's a little bit of like hedging in there that I had to do, but generally , bring your problems to teams. Don't bring your problems to like one hero in the middle of the night or whatever. Like, that's like something that I'll tell people and it's, it's reinforcement when they see the team deliver something that solves a problem. When problems come in and everyone's like, oh, I don't really know how we're gonna solve this, I'm like, bring it to the team. You know why? Because teams solve problems the heroes don't solve problems. So those kinds of things you can definitely track. Yeah and it's a real simple, just simply put a sticky note somewhere and just say how many times a day or how many times a week or whatever. And the other thing is going, we had a podcast about product manager communication is your only job. The other suggestion here is to create a message map showing who's who, who is hearing what and when, sort of like your old school comms plan that kind of thing. To discover like who is who. Is the repetition, reaching, and who is the repetition not reaching?'cause some people they're gonna get the message blasted out to them on a regular basis and some people on the fringes of the org or other teams or whatever, that they're not gonna get it. So like, what's your comm plan look like? Who should be the recipient of what type of information? What's the mode, right? Are we emailing? Are we texting? What are we doing? And how often the frequency, so if you map that out, and there's so many templates out there to do this, if you just Google stakeholder communication plan or just simply, communication plan project management has created all these templates over the years pick one that suits you or just come up with your own. We have three podcasts on this topic, by the way. We have three podcasts on the topic of communications ar Agile two 11 communication is products only job, or is it, that's is, that's fairly recent. Great. Great title. Arguing Agile 2 0 1. Mastering Stakeholder Communication and Management. That was the one that you were talking about. And then arguing 1 98.

Better Communication:

mastering Crucial Conversations because crucial conversations get you into the, Hey, you don't agree with this thing that I keep repeating. Let's vet that out and talk about it in a way where it doesn't like damage personal relationships and actually advances the organization. Anyway, those are three podcasts we did. If you listen to those three, you're better positioned than most executives with their like Forbes and HBR subscriptions you're good with those three podcasts right there that's, that. Plus this is like almost four hours of content for free that sets you ahead to be like, Hey, this is a better way to do it. So you got a message map, you got your repetition. You, you, you got some things to be aware of here. So repetition might, might be your job. You might be the, a chief repetition officer. I don't know. Let's talk about where repetition happens in meetings and specifically meetings around the work versus actually doing the work. Which brings us into one that I think there will be a spirited pushback in this category, which is, in the crisis of repetition. If we're on the side of like, well, I don't like repetition.'cause that means that we're not communicating well enough. Right? If that's my viewpoint. So, what you will hear from some people at the leadership level is to say like, oh, coordinating the work and the meetings as a manager, that is the actual work for me is to get everyone aligned, to get everyone on the same page, to draw out all of the dissenting viewpoints. Like the whole disagreeing commit. That's why I hate disagreeing, commit, disagreeing, commit sounds to me like shut up and just do what I say. That's, that's what it sounds like to me. Who does that? Except for Amazon? But that's what, the people that are like, the people that would push back against, that would be the people saying like, well, the meetings where we actually drive to alignment, like where you hear my repetition and you say like, Hey, you keep repeating this thing. What does that even mean? And then we talk about it. That is the work of leadership. The meaning is the work. That's also a validation if, say, if they're saying, you're repeating this, but what does that mean? You clearly didn't receive the message the way I intended so let's go about it a different way. You're doing this because the next step, the immediate next step. That this is blocking is execution. Execution meaning like operations like a chief operating officer. Do this with these people by this state, do this with this money by this state. The old PMI, you know what I mean? That kind of stuff is like, you can't even engage into that kind of, mechanical operations if you don't agree so again, on the side of the leadership folks in this saying like, well the decisions and the alignment happens in meetings that's on one side. So that I just generally threw out a lot of, there's more things I could throw out to say I mean the, the getting all the stuff out on the table before we start operating, like that prevents a bigger train wreck down the road when we all have different ideas.'cause Brian's repeating this high level thing, maybe Brian's like a. Chief technology officer and saying like, we gotta have agents for everything. And Om hears that and he's like, alright, we're gonna make agents for everything. Like the literal interpretation. Literal interpretation, yeah. The velocity of decision making often is more important than the velocity of punching out features. And usually the velocity of decision making is slower than it, it's slower. Has more impact, right. Than punching out the wrong features. Big problem. Which is a big problem. Agreed. That's a lot of for points that I threw out. So I'm hoping that you're gonna have some, you're gonna have some pushback in this category so a lot of times people complain saying, ah, more meetings, right. And meetings become this theatrical exercise where people are just going in there. If you've ever been to a meeting that you are invited to, but you don't know why, who hasn't? You just described my calendar right there right. So you are there, but you don't know why and you have other things that you'd rather be doing that you need to be doing. You probably gonna start doing some of those things during the meeting even. So my point is, you're not a hundred percent attentive. If that's happening, what it leads to is this idea that the message doesn't stick with you which forces , the deliverer. The deliverer of the message, the messenger to have to repeat themselves so, so there's, there's several things. Your through, there's like a lot of flack I'm flying into that you're throwing up right now. And I'm, I'm very confused and I don't know where to navigate, the, the, so you threw out a couple points. One. If you have poor role clarity, meaning like, oh, I don't know. I'm just inviting you to the meeting.'cause like, you seem to be on this you may not be the, your organization is for, sorry, like half of it is poor role. Sorry, I have to step back for a second. Like, part of it is poor role clarity. Like, I'm not quite sure who makes the decision, who's the decision maker. The other half of it is poor organizational management. There's like whatever the organizational equivalent of tech debt is. Like you've got that going on where it's not clear who is the decision maker for a thing. So I'm just gonna invite five people to the meeting and hopefully we can come to a consensus and just stay in the meeting until the consensus wafts out of the ether or whatever. You understand where I'm going here is like you, I understand. Perfect. Your org is messed up in the first place. And you probably should have solved that. I know that the people running the organization probably don't have the skill or the wherewithal or the Yeah, yeah. The intent. Even it's been a long time since I said wherewithal. Wherewithal. That's usually that's your word. Usually that's, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they just, they just don't they don't know it's a problem. And honestly, like it's, they're too busy to deal with it too busy playing golf. So he, here's the thing, right? They could be sailing yachts. My bad. Anyway. No, it's, it's all good. Listen if you are in an organization where there are racy matrices you know exactly what I'm about to say next. I know what you're about to say next. Are you responsible for something? Are you accountable for something? The C in RACI is, are, are you to be consulted for something? And the I is that big Bitbucket, are you supposed to be informed? If you're not sure, I'm gonna invite you so I'm gonna invite everybody. Some people invite their immediate managers, their supervisors to everything because then they could Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to phrase it. It's air cover. So they don't have either psychological safety or they don't have the prowess to say, I'm gonna go to this and I'll make decisions based on what I know and I'll back those up. No, they'd rather just be like you said, safe air covered safe. So, yeah. Safe. Exactly. This happens all the time. This is why you have meeting mania where you have a hundred people on a call. What do you do about this stuff? If you create your own meetings on other people's calendar, make sure you lock 'em down. Don't just let them forward them to any Tom, Dick, and Mary. That's the new phrase that I'm sure using now. I like it. Yeah, to be equitable, Tom, Dick, and Mary. So don't just forward that onto anyone. So lock it down so that they, whoever they think it should go to, they have to come to you for, and then you decide, how's that? You're gonna limit the audience. The other thing is, in your meeting, have an agenda, but also have expected outcomes and who they're supposed to be coming from. Any major decisions. This is what we're gonna talk about. Here are expected outcomes. Here are the things that people are going to opine on these are the decision makers, Fred, Julie, whoever it might be. These are the people that I want people to like, understand. They're in this meeting, they're gonna provide direction. Yeah. I almost want people to start tracking like this meeting that I'm going to. I almost want them to start tracking it just from their perspective, but it's probably better to do like a organizational kind of map to say if this person is not in the meeting, then the meeting cannot reach a proper consensus decision, or a decision of any kind. So, if you're talking about if Brian's in charge of widget A and they're trying to make a decision, like widget A should have this new functionality. Obviously if Brian is not in the meeting, they can't decide this is gonna go on widget a's roadmap as the top priority. But they can call a meeting and invite me to it, and they can show me good evidence that widget a should be my top priority and try to get me to change my roadmap, basically. That's what I'm saying this is, I'm just trying to make it very, a very personal and direct yeah. That kind of thing for the organization in any kinda meeting you're in, like to just like think about like, if this person's not in the meeting, the meeting is not gonna have an outcome that is like substantial. Worthwhile worthwhile exactly. Exactly. If you start thinking about your meanings that way, it's like. Who needs to be in here to make the decision. I don't like the racy matrix, just like outright, like I think there's the podcast I mentioned earlier, we gave better examples than a racy. Yeah, we did. But that's just my, my opinions are weird and only my opinions and not the opinions of Om or the Arguing Agile podcast in any way, shape, or form. Maybe, maybe now you've been disclaimed maybe anyway. Sorry, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to read the takeaway In this category, it says track what actually breaks versus what people just worry might break. Most teams discovered 80% of the repetitive meetings were actually just security blankets, not necessity. I'm not quite sure about the 80% there that, I think that's kind of a nonsense number, but I do get what they're saying, I do get what the notes here are saying the security of a, like a consensus decision rather than like trying to convince the decision maker with evidence or whatever so I don't know. Well, it's also the other way too. It's the decision maker saying, look I've already, I've already relayed this message on six different occasions, and if the audience doesn't understand it, it's not on me. Right some cultures will actually reward that kind of thing. It's like, no, you did a great job. You've done this. Six meetings. Come on. so we've reached the interesting part of the podcast where the problem isn't meetings or repetition, but that we've fundamentally lost the ability to communicate with people at their own attention span and reach them and, and meet them where they are. That's what I'm trying to say. Meet them where they're, meet them where they are because another thing, working against the topic today of like, well, I've gotta keep repeating myself, and this is crazy, I don't understand why I gotta keep repeating myself. Is that like the, the world is in, in attention crisis today, the whole world. Yes, I agree. And, in the old school, you were just competing with like, forgetfulness. Like, I forgot we made this decision in this meeting 'cause nobody wrote it down or whatever. And we didn't have any auto automated note takers Right. Or special tools that's not even what you're competing with now. Like you're competing with, you go to a meeting and you have your laptop open or your phone with you or whatever. Like you're under a barrage, a constant attack of things, trying to steal your attention away from the meeting you're in. And even that aside, you go back to your desk and like all bets are off. Like you go back to your desk and you go, you got emails waiting, you got Slack messages waiting. You got all kinds of, some popups, notifications, banners, like app badges, all kinds of stuff. Too much too many stimuli. See too much pressure. Is that what you're about to say? Too much pressure TWEAK!. No. So we're talking about the attention crisis here. Like the attention crisis for me can be manifest by three, three things. Nobody reads what I write. Nobody listens to what I say in the meetings and nobody watches like if I record a demo or whatever, like nobody watches, which is again, one of my main reasons why I like, I, I am super stubborn about like, well, Brian, just record your sprint demos and we'll watch 'em later. I'm like, will you watch 'em later? You watch 'em at two times the speed and never understand the word I said, and you won't say anything to me at all. Everyone does that. You don't gimme any feedback why am I gonna do that? People request like, oh, Brian, record your demos and throw'em out there in the network when you're done with 'em. And I'll watch 'em later. I'm like, really? Or am I just contributing to just more content that's out there than you can even consume in a workday? Number one, even if you wanted to, you couldn't. And number two, I'm just throwing more noise into the ether. Mm-hmm. So let's say you're at a company and we have like five product managers and we're all recording demos and throwing 'em into the ether, and we all demo every week. Like, how much content is that you're gonna absorb five hours a week every week? The reality is you're not gonna absorb any of it, right? So sadly, that is the reality of it. Now, here's the thing, just to piggyback off what you said. People are asking you to record the demos, right? As if the purpose was just for them to watch. This is not a circus people, right? You have to get feedback that's, an activity that happens in real time where they ask questions, you respond, you can ask more questions, et cetera. It goes back and forth that's the point of a demo. Not, oh look, we built something. It's like, well then what's the point if you're gonna record that just to check a box? So I, I'll tell you where I get in trouble with this, and this is, this is where, this is where I need you to step in my office, close the door, like sit, sit down on the couch. Like, don't, don't, don't ask, don't ask. It's, it's getting, things are getting weird. Okay. Because I, my arguing point in this one is to solve this problem. Again, going earlier in the podcast, we already noted, we already agreed we got some organizational deficiencies. Okay. Obviously we're not gonna solve that because those are hard problems to solve. So we're gonna like what's the lack of executive function where you can't do the most important thing because it's hard and requires a lot of focus. So you do a lot of little easy things. But they're not important. So then you get in trouble for not doing the important things that's a real thing. I can't remember what it's called. They just sidetracked that by saying we got that. It's on a future roadmap what I would say is this is a failure in prioritization or the hierarchy of information. I don't know exactly how to say what I'm trying to say, which is there is a here's the information, you should consume.'cause it's really important to you in the organization. And here is it presented in the order that you need to consume it. And because there's so many channels of communication and so many different feeds of communication between teams, inside of teams, everything is not equally important all the time. This is sort of like the product equivalent of solving the wrong problem is like, well just record all your meetings and throw 'em in there so anyone can listen. I would say instead of more communication and then throwing it on the individual to be like, well, you just didn't listen to the right communications and whatever. I would say, instead of repeating more stuff, we should communicate less with less like interlocking circles. But the communication we do have is better communication where like you're not watching after the fact, you're making time to be in that meeting so that you can contribute to asking questions when we're doing a demo. And then if you, listen to a demo, because that was recorded, like you're listening to a bunch of people that are really interested and engaged about the subject matter. And the reason that you're listening to it is because you are in no way, shape, or form as engaged or interested in the subject. As the people that were in that room and basically what I'm saying is I know what I'm saying. I'm trying to figure out what to say on the podcast you're your eye on the racing matrix on the podcast. I'm trying to say all the smart people were talking about the thing and you, the eye on the racing matrix. You're the eye on the matrix. You're, you are supposed to be informed. So, which is my way if I'm organizing this recording, et cetera, is my way of saying, you don't matter. That's what it is. Bluntly. You don't matter. You, you're, you say you want to be informed because you have a title. Okay, fine. Go watch this. I know you're not going to but I wanna go back to something you said, which was very interesting. It's not just the information that's out there coming at you, et cetera. It should be presented in the order sadly, that doesn't happen. I don't, I've never seen that happen. That's because of information proliferation. Absolutely. We have so many sources. Synchronicity wasn't just an album by the police. It's real synchronicity. You're supposed to get all of this stuff coming at you. You deal with it right away because it's the most important thing. Every one of those things is the most important thing right now. It could be work, but it's also like your significant other. Your kid just says, Hey dad, watch this. This is the video I just saw on TikTok. They want you to see it right now because they're looking for feedback ? They've got their beak open as the mother bird. They want you to drop something in their mouth. This is the problem. We have too much throwing being thrown at us, and we have no basis for. Discerning what we should be listening to, what we should be deferring, yikes. Or avoiding altogether. Honestly, this could have been the, Hey, no one listens anymore. It could have been a podcast like multitasking, like all kinds of notifications turned on, like phone notifications, like noise notifications as well as like popups and like app badge icons and stuff like that. Going and searching for documentation. Like your Indiana Jones over here because you can't find what you need.'cause you're, you have no real like, knowledge management system set. Like no one ever thought about it. The way, JIRA is not a knowledge management system. I just wanna point that out. Like not at all. No matter how much they're charging you. And then like all these competing priorities. Because you have so many alternate competing priorities, that's the reason this repetition is needed., If you only were working on one priority and you stayed on it, you stayed on that problem until it was done when you listen to, like Marty Kagan's, like Silicon Valley people, they'll be like, oh, like Google just like peels off a team and dedicates 'em to work on the highest priority for 18 months, two years, and they just knock it down and now suddenly they're a business leader, right? And I'm like, oh, it's a, it's magic. How does Google get their money? Oh, it is because they're willing to pay for a team to be focused on something. And anybody could do that. It's, that's not magic, right I think at the end of the day, the question is highest priority according to whom, right? So when you have a stakeholder or a person driving the priorities and relaying those onto the team saying, these are the things that we should be working on, and by the way, there's only ever one priority one, right? So oftentimes a team will say, okay, we, we understand. I wanna work on that top priority. Great. Let's go yeah. Everyone starts working and then some other stakeholder comes along and says, work on this. This is also high priority we already have a high priority item we're working on but this is also high priority so you can work on that other thing, but also work on mine. Now they're saying you have priority one A, one B, one C. That's a fallacy, right? There is no one a, one B, one C there's only ever a one, two, and a three, which is why most ALM tools worth their salt. They have an ordered backlog. There's a reason why there's an order in the backlog but most teams don't really abide by that because it's the loudest person or the highest person, whoever that tells you to work on it, you jump. Right? That's what you do. And I'm not gonna talk about this today too much, but just mention it, that there is such a thing as switching costs when you're switching between these things, right? So it's not like, we'll get back to this in two days or, or a week when you get back to it, you're actually paying a switching cost. And research has proved that cost will be 20% of the size of the task. We should talk about that in another podcast. Hey, we did a once over of the research. This is kind of what the findings are, and this is kind of our takeaway. There's a lot of research out there on this topic. I think that would be worth it for people should be easily able to do that for this category. I would say organizationally some of the hangups that we pointed out earlier you need to solve some of those to say like, well, like for this thing, whatever the thing is, like product is easy because you just pointed a product manager like this product manager for this product makes all decisions. That's straightforward. It's a single source of truth. Remember back in the day when you used to take a database and the contents would get split to different places or maybe copied somewhere else. Maybe you have backups. I worked at a place one time where like they didn't want to give access to read from production database. So they would replicate the production database. A reporting database, yeah. And to a reporting database. And then they wonder why there's discrepancies and then there's discrepancies. Yeah., But then there's always that one developer who goes straight to production 'cause they want the single source of truth in your decision making, you want to go back to the single source of truth. So it's , like one document of like, , what does the future of your product look like? Well, you probably have a document that describes that or something. Or maybe you don't have a document and I just gotta come to you and be like, what's in the future? You tell me, one owner for an initiative, one document for a roadmap one PRD. If you're doing PRD one, update channel, if you use Slack or something like that, like our updates go out into one channel if you wanna know about product A and the new releases or whatever they're putting out, go to like Slack channel for product A and that's the one channel it goes to. Stuff might filter out into other channels, everyone knows, they can just go to that Slack channel, say, Hey, what's going on with this x, y, Z feature that I heard of? They can go to one place. So like, that would be my actionable takeaway in this category is everybody's under attack in, in every way, shape, or form for their attention. And the way to cut that down is. Like the old Mike Miller, one by one by one, make one slack channel where one person is accountable to responding and that's the end of the story. And then if you have other problems that other organizations I've been in, that the problem is like a lot of different people can make the decision and they don't necessarily all talk to each other then that also solves, this is like you know, one channel, one person's gonna respond, and all those people who can make decisions agree to say ticket to the channel, that one person's gonna respond maybe sometimes that one person responds, gets it wrong, and then everyone jumps on them, which is fine. That's how it should be, right? That's how it should be. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what you're saying is when you have a system in place in your org where decisions are made by committee. Right then having something like a single channel, even though it's multiple people for various aspects of it, perhaps you're centralizing the channel, right? So the consumers are in that same channel. It's the product, right? Which all of these other things are components of. That's a good way to really minimize all the noise, and the potential to get it wrong, which in turn comes back to full circle on this topic, which is you'd have fewer reasons to repeat the message, right? Because it's everyone's consuming the same message most of the time. So we're drowning in noise. Nobody's paying attention. But what if the real issue is that we've stopped holding people accountable for listening? I, I don't necessarily agree with this one, om, but I'm gonna throw it out like I do, which is, I'm gonna say it that the psychological safety focused culture that you agileists. That's right. I'm pointing fingers. That's how you know. It's a great point. I'm not gonna say we're gonna stay on this point long in the podcast, but. It's gonna come up as an arguing point is you guys have strayed from command and control where we pointed at a person and said they're in command. They you do what they say, I don't need this. Testing things against the marketer MVPs or whatever. They know what the best thing is. That's why I hired them. And that, that's, that's, that's easier than this like, consensus driven building, decision making, discovery type of activities. You know, the people, the people that are out there that are not convinced that like Marty Cagan can work in a normal corporate. That's, that's what I'm talking about right here. They'll, they'll say accountability, accountability. Is the missing piece here. They'll say, they'll say repetition. The repetition that you were talking about in the podcast that we're both talking about like, that just enables laziness. That enables people to like, nod their head in the meeting and not really understand and get back to their day and not carry forward our decisions as leaders. We're important managers in this organization home. Okay. We can't have people getting away with the, I'm using the language sarcastically. But this is like what people say. They look at this conflict avoidant, like repeating things often because people didn't get them the first time. They'll say this is like a softness of culture. That's what they'll say so you're right. Command and control. We did get things done. We didn't get the right things done quite often, but we got them done. We didn't get them done. In the way we thought we would get them done, which is the result of all that big planning upfront type of thing. Right. So here we are. Fast forward. You know, the difference is product cycles have now diminished considerably. Competition has grown very global for most organizations. Customer needs are changing faster than ever before whereas in the past it wasn't the case. You kind of get a signal and say, yeah, that's what they need and we'll come up with a solution a few months from now and it's still largely gonna land. That's not a given now so your competitors will swoop down and eat your breakfast, nevermind your lunch. You really do have to build consensus so that you're building. The right things, despite all the focus on building the things right. Which is all the process oriented stuff the agileists are spending their time on. That's great. That's all needed. You can't climb a staircase in the dark if you, if you've never climbed it before with your eyes closed.'cause you don't know how big the steps are. So it sounds like you're saying that the problem is quality, not quantity. That's what it sounds like. There's pretty much, there's a couple arguments that you're making here that are like, I'm gonna try to pull apart quality, not quantity, which is like you actually need to care about the problem. Okay. Accountability is not a dirty word when accountability is like, I care about this, so I'm going to be accountable for it because I want to solve this thing. That's what I do in product management day to day. Don't use accountability as a dirty word because the quickest way to get me to turn against you is to try. To use accountability as a dirty word. It's being weaponized way more often than it should, out there. Web right? Accountability. You said you would do this, you said you are, but it's you. It's you, you Right. That's the wrong culture. It's, there's some finger pointing happening in there when I Absolutely, when I'm like, listen, my, my, again, I, I said before on the podcast, heroes don't solve things. Like teams solve things and the team is taking accountability for solving this thing. That means the team is stepping in to deal with it. And when a person, I like teams don't normally finger point, it's usually a person, right? So like a person is finger pointing and there's a whole team on the other side that usually is a counterbalance to like cut that stuff out real, real quick. But, the other thing I wanna point out before we move on is psychological safety being used as a weapon surveillance culture, command control, surveillance culture being used as a weapon. The organizations that have the safety enable innovation to a point where the organizations that don't like it, it's night and day it's second nature to those orgs that actually have that in place they don't think about this as innovation because that's how we work it just becomes ingrained in the psyche of the people that work there whereas the other side of the equation, is stifling innovation because no one wants to take a risk. Right. You know, all of that finger pointing so everyone plays safe they could play safe. I don't know. Like they, they might even be able to be certifiable or certified. What, what is, I dunno, certifi, I, I've always better. I like, like that one. I messed that one up. The against really is not that good here but, but there is a takeaway that I wanted to highlight that we put in the notes for this section, which is a communication contract and not really a contract. It's more of a working agreement. Like it's a fact. It's more, more than anything. It's is this is how we agree to work. Yeah, yeah. Communication, like working agreement that basically says like, who needs to know what by when that could be across teams, that could be across a team and an individual. It could be a lot of different things. It's a communication plan to say like. When these things happen, and if you think about it with your team, it's not that much stuff. Say like when, when we find a bug that blows up production, we notify this Slack channel, we, email this person with an after action report or something like that. Or when we release a new feature, we invite these people to the demo to give them an opportunity to see it or I would say if you really thought about all of your touch points, I don't think it would be that much for a team to just build a, just a quick plan to be like, what is, what is our plan to drive out into the business so that we don't have to keep repeating ourselves? Hey, we did, we, we released feature a two months ago and. You know? Right. Oh, you, you didn't know that's I, I agree with that. It's really not that hard of a lift. Now the thing to remember is any kind of communication plan or whatever you wanna call this matrix, right. That needs to be co-created by the team. Yeah. Not thrust upon the team by somebody with some other purpose in mind, right? No, you don't take that as an order from someone else. You co-create it. And the second thing is, it is not a one and done. So it's a living, breathing thing as you learn more, change it, it's yours. So change it, right? Mm-hmm. So it doesn't look the same months out than it did when at inception right. Because need drives innovation at that point, and the team owns the innovation okay. to transition to the next category, there is a thing called Parkinson's Law and it says that work expands to fill the time available. So with that as a given, in the world where entire roles exist to facilitate communication between teams, and I'm specifically talking about the scrum master right now, right. But also like in a world where you don't have scrum masters, it could be team leads, I've known many a development team leads where they don't actually do any development anymore 'cause they're so busy driving alignment. Between teams, they're the glue because the organization doesn't have product managers or scrum masters, they just get yelled at to do something. And the team leads have to basically take on both these roles and drive quote requirements between teams. So in that world I could easily see someone looking at a person like that, like a scrum master, not a team lead developer who's been taken off of doing development to do this kinda stuff. I could see it and, and many times people talk about Scrum masters like this, where like, well, that's just like organizational bloat. We're talking about repetition. So wrapped in the guise of repetition that is the organizational middle manager equivalent of like creating a job for yourself where your job is just to like, repeat things that other people say. Ooh, that's interesting because often people will say the opposite, which is, especially people that have played the role of a scrum master, they'll say the role is to work themselves out of a job. Right. So this is interesting that I'm seeing the two things. I'm trying to juxtapose both of those together. I will say this, going back to what you started with, there are teams that have a scrum master, right? And yet the team leads the tech leads, team leads. It could be testers, QA leads, right? Yeah. These leads are working with other teams that they need to collaborate with for the solution and it could be as simple as, yeah, your individual team products are actually discreet enough, but launching them into an environment production, for example, it requires coordination, right? They have to go first before you do, or vice versa. So communication is really job one for these people, right they may not do testing or coding, or they may just do some of it for example, tech leads. They may be limiting themselves to doing PR reviews or approving prs. That's still value add because they're not just blindly doing that. But what's important is they have a forum i'm thinking about Scrum Masters have, a scaled daily scrum and things like that, the tech folks can have their own where the tech leads meet together and they'll say whatever's on their radar. So a tech lead who's become aware of some tool that everyone's using is becoming deprecated, right? Is as an example. They can say, has everyone, anyone heard about this? We're using this. What's our plan to get off of this? Or what, what's next? Right? No one else has thought about it. Perhaps there's value add in those regular, small, short touch points. Yeah. Doesn't matter what you call 'em, right? It's, but the audience should be that like-minded audience. So you're saying coordination is legitimate work you you're, you're specifically pointing to like, scale. I should have posted this, this is stuff that I should post. The podcast that just went up was August 20th. So as we're filming this, the August 20th arguing Agile 2 25, the team that got you here, navigating Growth and Team Evolution, that was a podcast that just went up. And in the description of that, I was very careful not to say the word scaling because what I was really talking about, I might have put it in there once. I don't know. I'm looking at the, yeah, as you scale, it says your founding team delivered your first million dollar quarter, but can they scale you to 10 million? I took scale out of most of this because, I realized that on the market, the word for scale has morphed with the people that are trying to sell stuff and pitch themselves that the word scale has become the word growth on the market. I didn't realize that until I was in the edit. I really didn't internalize it and be like, oh. I should change the way I write this stuff.'cause the way I think about scaling is like okay, well you have a team, you produce some software, it's great, everyone likes it. You're bringing a profit for the business and you do whatever. But then you need to go back and change your software to be like, you're shipping it to 10, 20, 30 concurrent users. Now you wanna make 2 million thousands concurrent users. Something like that right. Like that's a different, like you need to like completely change your software and the team, this is, this is what arguing manage 2 25 was all about the team that got you there. They might, they may not even be interested in doing that work. That work might be boring to them to rewrite every function with the understanding of like, well, what happens if there's database locks and what happens if there's whatever, you know what I mean? Like, it might be boring and they might not, not be interested in that, growth. And by growth I mean scaling like by a thousand times of your current volume. Yeah. That requires coordination. And how much money are you willing to spend in coordination costs to get, like if we spend this much money, we can get 10 times growth. If we spend this much money, we get a thousand times growth. You're already assuming linearity here. I know growth is not linear. Linear, so it's kind of a crappy example. But the example does hold, say like, well if you step back and you look at your scaling after the fact on a matter of like financial return, you probably have some sort of factor of we put this much money into it that we really didn't have a good measure at the time we put it in like nobody knows how to like ROIs of scrum masters. Nobody knows how to do that forget a scrum master. Like take out of this conversation a second. Go hire a PhD in organizational psychology that has 10 years of work experience. What is the ROI of what they're doing inside of your business? Well, they're not directly writing software and they're not directly creating business strategy and doing sales. So like I feel that they're not doing either of those things. Like they're added to overhead and now I don't know and I like, you know what I mean? Like I just lost all the sad reality is in that scenario, right? Often how their ROI is measured. Short term what's the ROI short term, right? This quarter I'm paying for a scrum master for a whole quarter or a year, whatever, by people that don't understand the details around how work gets done and what, where the value is delivered. So that org design PhD that you're hiring, they may not have a tangible, perceptible, measurable ROI in the quarter. Right? But fast forward two years now, your org is better structured, better aligned, and the ROI goes up through the roof. But is that how you're measuring that, right? That that's part of the difficulty? Also the point of this category is you don't know what kind of disasters you're going to prevent by being proactive about managing this stuff. That's this, that's this category of being like, oh, well the scrum master can't justify ROI or whatever. Like, okay, well how many, how many disasters are you prepping your business for in the coming year? And I, I feel like most people will hear that. And it's, it's so heady. They won't be able to conceptualize it. Oh, you know what, they're gonna go right away if you ask that they're gonna say. Disaster planning. We have that. Yeah, I know. We're gonna plan for hurricanes. I know we're gonna plan for tornados. That's the disaster planning that they think about. But the scrum master equivalent is if we hire somebody whose only job is coordination and they can help us avoid these outages, downtimes, so if you're not budgeting for any, oh, our system is gonna be up a hundred percent of the time, a hundred percent uptime, I live in Tampa, Florida. I'm budgeting to have exactly zero hurricanes in the next year and have zero internet outage, zero power outage, now you can have lower productivity. I get it. Yes. So I, I would say yes. And on that one, see Julie, I learned something from you. So you don't just take the average number of hurricanes, right? So, sorry. Yeah, definitely toast toaster so coming back to the other side of the, well why we use the analogy to begin with product or scrum master. You don't know the ROI, but what you do know is not having that person is gonna cost you. Right. And one way to measure that I don't recommend this, is to not have a scrum master product owner for a year and then see where you miss the mark this is not long jump where you can keep trying several times and get closer and closer to the end, right? You only have one shot basically with your customers. You miss it with a product. The product failed. You lost the customer, but you lost more than that. You have reputation damage now. On that, you cannot put a price. Well, a lie business is that we're all aligned, okay? We talk about in this podcast, we're not aligned. But we're all super tired of pretending to agree. And also we're all tired of Brian saying the same thing over and over again. Like, I they're not reinforcing consensus because they're not driving to consensus because of many reasons that we talk about this podcast. You need to drive to the consensus. You need to drive to the vision. You need to write it down somewhere. There's a lot of stuff we talk about in this podcast. It's hard for me to summarize, but I'm gonna try to, I'm gonna say the repetition. Like, it's not a communication problem that you've uncovered because your product people or your leaders or whatever keep repeating the same thing. It's not a quote problem. The reason they're doing that is because they're reflecting some dysfunctions in the organization. So yes, in ideal world, I would say things once, maybe documented, and that would be the end of it. Everyone would be aligned. That's not the real world accountability we talked about fake alignment. Well, we didn't really go too deep into like, people thinking, like saying they agree, but don't really agree. I feel that should be another podcast out of this one. Definitely. And then the challenge, like the few things that we throw out throughout in the podcast is like, call to actions. Things you can do is like every time you repeat yourself, like maybe mark it down to like, maybe write an indicator of like, why, like are you, are you saying something for the first time? Are you refining the way that you said something? So you're changing the message slightly?, Or are you just reinforcing. To try to build that consensus organization wide. We covered a lot of ground on this podcast. We didn't talk about other things that you said we should defer to a different podcast, which I agree with a lot know if you, if if ever been in a town hall meeting where you're all muted, all 400 of you and some leader gets up on their podium and they say, watch this, this is what we're doing. Rah, rah, rah. Any questions? And anytime anybody asks a question, by the way, the first few questions are usually planted i'm sure that's not news to people that have been around the block, but you know, so I need the music. Dun, dun dun so, so when you, when you say something and everyone on the call says, sees who it is, yeah. That's not psychologically safe, so most people are just gonna say, you don't really know what this guy's talking about, but whatever. Yeah that's a waste of time times 400. Yes so an hour long, one of those, that's a lot of money folks, right? So if you're in that, feel free to do one of two things. Either if you are one of the organizers of such a, construct, feel free to provide forums where people can ask questions without being identified so that you can answer them. You're soliciting these actively, not trying to suppress them, right? Mm-hmm. But if you're also one of the participants, right? Then I would say grow up here and say, look, I'm asking this question and this is the reason why. And here's my question. Don't lead with the question because immediately you are pigeonholed into Yeah. You're a troublemaker, right? We'll say that one more time on this podcast, I guess. Keep that resume updated, folks. Oh, sorry. Well if you like this podcast like, and subscribe share the podcast with someone who can, I know there are people out there that can use this podcast. Share it with a leader or or maybe even a director of your choice, share it with people that are sick of repeating themselves. It doesn't matter who it's Right. And let's know in the comments below what other topics you want us to delve into. And we will be happy to oblige.