- The more you trust people, and the better the frames you provide to be self-sufficient the better the productivity will be.
- Controlling where not needed is inefficiency
- Trusting enables self-controlling capabilities / autonomy
Working with development-teams, what I often heard from managers and POs was "They are not delivering as promised" (Talking about the team) or "I don't know what this person is even doing" (Implying laziness and incompetence).
On the contrary, what I heard from the development teams was "The tickets are not containing all the information that I need for knowing what to build" (meaning; I cannot know how exactly you imagined it, and don't want to be blamed for the end result).
While good tickets are a topic that can easily fill a post themselves, the overlying issue was a lack of trust and responsibility. To demonstrate, here's the scenario demanded by the two:
Scenario 1: Managed employees
The Scenario that both, developer and Product owner are asking for, would be the following:
- The product owner describes in all detail, what the end result should look like, creating a comprehensive ticket - and involves all necessary components including design and technical requirements like loading times, component behavior etc.
- A developer picks up the ticket and goes through it realizing the result by instruction. Some of the request might require more time. To make it possible he can do over-hours or add additional libraries. At the end, he has created a feature as close as possible to the the POs (Product Owners) request.
- The best thing that can happen, is that the POs standards are met. The PO can check a tick.
The good part about this scenario is, that the responsibilities are clear. The very inefficient and I believe bad part is, that product owner and developer are thinking and operating in silos and have no real understanding for the opposites needs. How should the product owner define the scope if his understanding of what can be done only scratches the surface? And how should a Developer save time and increase productivity by creating the results in more efficient ways without knowing where the business objectives lay? And how should she build sustainable code, that not only creates the intended results but also is scale-able towards the business objective?
Splitting responsibility clearly can be beneficial - however knowledge-transfer is required - and employees work best, when they are enabled to use their full set of tools and involve their own thinking. The management-term always is coined negatively, as managing people creates insufficiency and reduces the amount of people that use their brain on how to achieve the greater target.
The second Scenario shows, how an enabled team can operate:
Scenario 2: Enabled employees
I believe, that there is a better, more efficient and satisfactory method of achieving much greater results:
- The PO gathers all relevant information for a product or its functionalities to succeed in the market.
- He describes the business objective in a language that can be understood by the people that he is working with.
- He presents the objectives and supports to get all questions answered.
- Developers and Designers work together to figure out the best way to solve the problem.
If successful, enabling employees creates much greater, efficient and salable results. While it might require an acclimatization period for workers and Product Owners to learn speaking a shared language, once established there will be many more brains working and figuring out much better solutions then a single person can imagine.
Once a target-giver starts to put trust on others to find the best solutions, it creates responsibility, momentum and care on the workers side, and creates more satisfaction on the task-givers, the task receivers and the task benefited (the end user).
Giving trust is a win-win-win. It requires time to get into a working model in which trust leads, so it is an investment. The fabulous outcomes however speak for themselves and every manager with a brain understands what potentials he drowns if he does not create an environment that enables trust and responsibility.