Apply These 5 Product Team Tactics to Bypass Emotion and Act With Clarity

Escape the trap of emotion-driven development.

The other day, in an attempt to avoid setting a deadline to motivate a team to perform, a manager told me:

“None of my peers work this way. I feel like the odd duck.”

And just like that, a familiar enemy of change appeared.

Emotion.

Emotion is to change as oil is to water. They don’t mix. And the result is change that takes longer than it should, or that never happens at all.

Emotions can drive teams and managers to avoid change.

But to develop great products, we have to embrace change. We must avoid emotion-driven (change-resistant) development.

If this speaks to you, you are in the right place. Teams I’ve coached tend to use 5 proven tactics to break free from emotion and act with clarity in the face of change. You can learn these below. And I threw in a sixth, go-to, ultimate bonus tactic, so be sure to steal that one.

So, let’s dive in, shall we?

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This year, I’ve committed my focus to a concept called Lean Leverage, as described in my inaugural 2024 post. Each article I craft this year, including this one (the 15th in the series), will focus on an aspect of Lean Leverage. Enjoy and stay tuned for many ways to do more with less.

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5 Product Team Tactics to Bypass Emotion and Act With Clarity

Why is change so important in product development?

• Scope continually shifts to address evolving user needs and to outpace competitors.
• Technology evolves at an ever-increasing pace.
• Product teams change and the people on them have up days and down days.
• Development is complex and uncertain, leading to unpredictable events.
  

Product work is all about change. You can’t separate the two. If you don’t change as new evidence emerges, your product can’t evolve. You will not be able to build the right thing, in the right way, at the right time.

Here’s the rub: emotion is tied to change, even though the two are enemies.

When faced with change, emotions creep in—you are losing the old and grappling with the new. Resistance appears next. If you fall prey to the resistance and don’t break free, your product will stagnate and not reach its potential.

Below are tactics to disrupt the pattern of emotion-driven development.

This is how you avoid stagnation—in your teams and in your product.

Tactic 1: How can we make this safe to try?

Nothing drives resistance to change like fear.

Take the example at the start of this article. You can feel like an outsider when you act differently from your peers. Violating established, long-held norms, like setting deadlines, can do this.

Standing out becomes perilous in an organization that rewards coloring inside the lines.

In this case, the manager feared being labeled as different. The fear was real. It had the potential to affect the person’s status (and career trajectory) in the organization.

Just the thought of unsavory career impacts causes many to stay in their lane of comfort.

So, we need to break the downward spiral of fear. It’s crucial for learning, growing, and trying new things.

Here are some individual and team tactics to put a safety net under change:

• Discuss intent and reasoning with management to gain support.
• Try a small-scale experiment before going all-in.
• Get another team or person to try it with you; there’s power in numbers.
  

And management can support safety by:

• Making experimentation expected and safe (to fail).
• Encouraging custom, non-standardized, fit-for-purpose approaches to ways of working.
• Avoiding rigid role boundaries to encourage collective ownership. You want an attitude of, “How can I help to make this better?” This avoids the stay-in-your-lane attitude of, “That’s not my job.”
  

Make safety a prerequisite to ignite thinking and acting outside the box.

Tactic 2: “Let’s try it.”

A team of smart people knows gridlock well.

The debate over two or more competing solutions to a problem can get heated. Each owner of an idea digs in and won’t budge. Emotion clouds judgment, and the team reaches an impasse.

Some see this debate as contentious, but diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of great teams.

Avoiding collaboration is not the answer. Neither is having a strong voice step in to dictate a decision.

What you want instead is to move past debate and into action.

The best way to do this is for someone on the team to step in and suggest, “Let’s try it.” Then, something magical happens when you move onto the terrain of an experiment. Everyone gets into the work and the debate dissipates.

And nine times out of ten, any of the solutions work as well as the others.

Once you try one, and everyone sees it work, the debate is over. If the first solution does not work, you try the next idea. If you are out of ideas, now you have evidence to form new ideas. And you keep going until the problem is solved. The faster you move into action, the faster you avoid or break through the logjam.

Action dissolves emotion.

Tactic 3: Be a detective and examine the results.

Subjective opinion can drive strong emotions.

After trying something new, everyone has a perspective on its effectiveness. This is heavily influenced by an individual’s beliefs and unique context. And the debates can get intense. How do we dilute the intensity?

You remove opinion-based emotion by examining the results of the experiment.

Look at the data.

But to make this work, you can’t just look at the results of the experiment. You need to take one extra step.

Before the team begins the experiment, they write down what they expect to happen. This allows everyone to get their “bets” on the table. Then, when the experiment is over, you can examine which bet came true. This simple comparison of expected results to actual evidence keeps emotion at bay.

Evidence and emotion are inversely related.

So, keep the expectations and evidence in focus to diffuse emotion.

Tactic 4: Turn from “Or” to “And.”

Product teams face a constant barrage of decisions between two options.

This can create anxiety, especially when both paths are uncertain (this is common). Or when picking one option causes a feeling of loss around the unchosen path. The worst thing you can do is panic and go through analysis paralysis on which path to choose. You might reach a state where you are frozen, unable to take a step forward.

You have fallen into the trap of the “Tyranny of the Or.”

Jim Collins wrote about the “Genius of the AND” and the “Tyranny of the OR” in his book, Built to Last.¹ His concept of the “Genius of the AND” stuck with me, and I have used it frequently over the years. He explains when debating options, you should reject the “Tyranny of the OR” to embrace the “Genius of the AND.” You should wholly execute two seemingly opposing options at the same time. The trick is to avoid diluting either option.

Let’s apply this to some common product team scenarios:

• How can leaders ensure a successful outcome AND still allow the team to grow and transform?
• How can the team go in the direction that leadership desires AND self-organize to a solution?
• How can the product lead decide AND we develop a mindset of collective product ownership in the team?
• How can the team be guided on how to use a new method AND, at the same time, be self-organizing?
• How can we make the feature useful AND keep it simple (without extra bells and whistles)?
  

Why pick a single path if you can thread the needle and take them both?

Tactic 5: Ask how it improves your system of work.

“I was hired to code, not do quality assurance.”

Heard anything like this? I have.

Local optimization results when team members only work on things they want, or are skilled, to work on. When team members desire to stay in their lane, the flow of value suffers. Sure, team members stay happy, doing only the tasks they like to do. But the unintegrated tasks pile up fast. The result: user value is in a constant state of being started but not finished.

When team members refuse to work outside their specialization, the system suffers. Emotion is driving individual development decisions.

To fix this, we have to shift the focus from individual desires to keeping customer value flowing. We must pursue the shortest path to finish valuable work as a team. We need to avoid keeping workers busy in their specialty, creating pieces and parts. The focus must be on the work and not the worker.

Solving a customer need sooner must be front and center.

And this brings us to the ultimate tactic for taking emotion out of product development.

The Ultimate Bonus Tactic: “What would the customer think?”

I said there were 5 tactics, but you get an extra one.

Actually, this one tactic can replace all the others. It removes all bias, all heated debate, and all selfish motives. It’s the emotion killer.

Just ask this one question:

“What would the customer think?”

If you imagine the customer is watching your team work, it tends to change the dynamic instantly.

• Would the customer think what we are doing is a value-added activity?
• Would they like us debating endlessly over the various options or would they rather us try them out?
• Would we look like we are moving to the right solution delivered in the right way at the time the customer needs it?
  

The customer is always right, so let’s rely on delighting the customer to guide our path rather than emotion.

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That’s it. Those are my 5 tactics (plus one) to side-step emotion in product development.

Give them a try and keep emotion at bay.

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Related Reads

If you liked this topic, you can go deeper in the following similar articles.

The Impacts of Change on the Brain and 5 Helpful Tweaks Change Agents Must Make

How Managers Embrace Change Like a Leader By Not Running Away From Friction

Don’t Neglect the 3 Critical Ingredients of Every Successful Change

References

1. Built to Last, Jim C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras 1994, 1997, Genius of the AND concept