On Product and Purpose

First of all, an apology - this newsletter hasn’t had this big of a gap before, this is the first time in two years I’ve slacked. I’m very grateful to all the readers who asked how I was and if everything was alright. It definitely is, more than alright, I’ve just been on the road from Central Europe to West US to Central America onboarding new clients, speaking and (since personal bits are now fashionable on LinkedIn) height of all efficiency, I also managed to move the "Get married in Vegas" ticket on one of these trips so missing two editions is not that shocking:)

Over these past few weeks, I’ve spoken about Agile, DevOps, culture and of course Psychological Safety and high performance to tens of teams and they each left me re-examining some things or pondering others. And of course, you can’t speak about teams and their high performance without coming back to what is at the centre of it all - the “why”. Purpose. Ideally, not only “purpose” but “impact” as well.

I’m always surprised how far this topic is from the minds of most tech teams. Yes they may have the yearly “hey ho, we are doing this for the diffuse and distant good of the country” stakeholders mission re-affirmation but God forbid you mention it on a Wedensday standup or ask when you meet the product owner how is it that they keep it front of mind - you’ll be met with glares galore. As if that’s yet another topic designed to just slow the team down and make them fall behind on the sprint alongside other “fluffy” ones to do with the human work.

One of the things I’ve learned, is that I need to check and attempt to shake my privilege and my bias on the topic. The privilege stems from how we are supremely lucky at PeopleNotTech as I keep telling my teams, that we make something so immediately life-altering to our users. Most everyone else works in industries where their contribution never has as clear and monumental of effects on the wellbeing of their users, so we are indeed spoiled to be able to have our impact so immediately evident that it powers our purpose. The bias is even harder to shake as it comes from a conceptual difference.

You see, to me, discussing and restating the “why” ad-nausea is a hygienic and mandatory part of both leadership and product ownership and not actually part of the “human work” as we define the work that we always insist the team does.