Clarity for Product Managers, Part 2: Situational Clarity
In my previous post, I introduced the four layers of clarity: directional, situational, role, and communication. In today’s post, we’re going to explore situational clarity in more detail. What is it and what steps can you take as a PM to achieve it?
Defining situational clarity
Establishing a clear direction for your team or project is an important step, but you’ll also need to have situational clarity in order to cooperate well and be successful.
Situational clarity is how you respond and act in the moment when you notice ambiguity. Sometimes this is just about speaking up and asking if you are not sure what the goal of a meeting is or why you are in this meeting. It also involves successful alignment, clear decisions, and managing conflicts of interest.
Unlike clear direction, where product managers are limited in their influence since some issues can only be resolved by senior management, all actively collaborating members, including PMs, have an important role to play with situational clarity.
Assessing your ability to provide situational clarity
To assess how well you are providing situational clarity, consider the following questions:
Can you complete joint projects as planned?
Your answer to this question is especially important for larger initiatives involving multiple product teams or cross-functional collaboration on product launches. It’s a good sign if all participants can deliver their part towards the overall success, fitting together perfectly despite dynamic conditions. Unfortunately, we often find ourselves experiencing unpleasant surprises where the individual contributions do not align, even when a project has been under way for quite some time.
Henrik Kniberg once perfectly illustrated this with his image of two teams building a bridge across a lake.
How quickly are decisions made?
What happens when a decision needs to be made during collaboration? This is a frequent occurrence for product people. Is it always clear to you how decisions are reached and who makes them?
What do you do in case of conflicts of interest?
What happens when you disagree with individual colleagues or other teams because you’re pursuing different interests?
I remember a situation at XING when I was responsible for the overall architecture of the Native Apps and a colleague, whose team was responsible for the Premium section, wanted to place it in the TabBar, one of the five always-accessible navigation points. From my perspective, it was a feature used only rarely and by a minority—while from his perspective, it was an important upsell trigger.
Have you ever experienced a similar situation? What did you do then?
My experience is that clarification often happens much too late in such situations, wasting valuable time and energy because...
we shy away from the effort of systematic alignment.
we believe for too long that everything is clear.
many people are involved, but nobody is responsible.
we don't want to risk personal relationships with our colleagues through escalations.
Concrete steps for situational clarity: Advice for PMs
So, what can you do to avoid finding yourself in these situations? Here’s my advice for PMs.
Be in the moment and don’t assume!
Things are moving fast in product development and it’s important that you keep an eye out for ambiguity and take every opportunity (no matter how small) to increase overall clarity. Every moment where you are being passive or ducking away is a missed opportunity. So act consciously and always push for more clarity!
Specifically, this also means that you should not silently rely on everything being clear, but rather ask repeatedly. Remember the popular saying, "If you assume you make an ass of U and Me"...
Strive for early collaborative alignment
Early collaborative alignment is the most crucial lever for avoiding late surprises and wasting time and energy of the kind you’ve seen in Hendrik Kniberg’s illustration above.
Alignment can also help you build trust with stakeholders and lets you identify the pending decisions.
This is why you should involve all relevant stakeholders and contributors early in the process and get into active alignment conversations to bring everybody onto the same page.
When I was at XING, we even developed a specific “Auftragsklärung” canvas to guide these alignment sessions. There’s an old blog post if you’re interested in the details. Here, I want to focus on some general learnings from that time:
Alignment does not mean that everybody has to agree
Instead, alignment is important to gain clarity about the perspectives of all relevant stakeholders and collaborators. Even if you identify conflicting interests or pending decisions, this is a good outcome because you can actively address them.
There are situations in which alignment is particularly important
Good alignment takes time. So realistically you will be less systematic and put less effort on alignment for a simple, uncontroversial addition to your product that you can do with little or no dependency. But there are also situations in which alignment is important:
Initiatives with high relevance to many heterogeneous decision makers
Initiatives that require collaboration with other teams and specialists
Initiatives with a high associated risk or high expected effort
There are different dimensions of alignment
When thinking about alignment, the most obvious is the upwards-alignment with superiors. But in collaboration, it’s also important to align laterally with your peers and partners and of course inwardly with your team.
Different contexts require different sequences of alignment
Realistically you can and should not speak to everyone at once. Instead, it’s good to pick the order based on context:
If you feel pretty sure about your understanding of your initiative, its technical implication etc., it’s OK to first speak to stakeholders outside of your team and only bring the team on board in the end. If you are less sure, however, it can make sense to first seek alignment within your team, so that you can represent the team well when speaking to others.
With regards to the right order of stakeholders, it’s important to consider how wild and not-yet-aligned you expect the stakeholders in management to be: If you sense that there are very different expectations of your initiative, I would first try to clarify these with the management and only then turn to lateral alignment. If you feel that there are no clashes or surprises to be expected from management, it’s more supportive of your collaboration if you start with your peers and partners and only afterwards get the management to confirm that they are on board as well.
It’s important to plan for active participation of alignment partners
Alignment is about dialogue and experiencing each other’s perspective. This only works if your counterparts actively participate and don’t just lurk in the meeting.
To support this, it makes sense to pick the right group size. I’ve found that two to six is a good size to still have everyone actively involved and without having “back-benchers.” In addition it helps to explicitly label these gatherings as a “workshop” (instead of a meeting) to provide a clear framing that active participation is expected. When going through the different aspects to align about I recommend that you ask every participant to write their perspective on a Post-it and share it. This way you kindly force participants to externalize their individual views instead of only nodding along with what somebody else said.
If you identify controversies, make sure that each perspective is understood and acknowledged, but don’t get stuck discussing them at length.
If you see the need to cluster and condense the different perspectives, don’t do so with everybody in the room, but rather take that with you as a follow-up to use the time in the workshop to focus on surfacing the participants’ perspectives.
Actively steer the alignment to include potentially controversial topics
I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons we tend to shy away from clarity is the fear of finding out that we have different or opposing views on things and that these subject matter differences may damage our relationships. But this is short-sighted, because if there are opposing views they will eventually surface anyways. Plus, if that happens late in the process, the damage (to the collaboration and the relationship) will be much bigger. That’s why it helps to actively steer workshops to some of the more tricky topics and ask questions to prompt people to really share their perspective.
Here’s a quick cheat sheet to guide your discussion:
Starting Point:
What’s the problem for the user that’s worth fixing?
How many users are affected? How often?
Future State:
What does it feel like for me as a user when this initiative is done?
(Don’t describe features here. Instead, think in more abstract terms, e.g. jobs to be done)
Hypotheses:
What must be true so that our initiative brings us closer to the future state?
(format: If we… then… because… We will know that this is true when….)
Input
How big is the total investment (people months and other costs)
Output
Short-term: What is the first increment in front of users?
Long-term: How do we approach the following phases?
What’s out of scope (but may be expected from stakeholders)?
Outcome
How do you measure success (format: from <baseline> to <target>)
How would you know early that you are on a good track?
What must not happen as a side effect?
Of these topics I find the Future State, Hypotheses, and Outcome to be most important.
Collaborative alignment will massively increase the collective clarity about your initiative and serve as a strong foundation for successful collaboration.
One potential outcome of collaborative alignment is that you detect conflicting interests or opinions that you cannot resolve among the people involved. This brings me to the next topic:
Real escalation!
I encourage you to not view escalation as something negative. There are some situations where an escalation is the only thing that can unblock you and bring the necessary clarification. And that's totally okay if done right. The following four steps have worked for me:
It's important to first admit that you will not agree. Remember the example with the Premium area in the XING app I mentioned earlier. The underlying conflict between two goals could not be resolved by two PMs. One was responsible for activity, the other for upsells.
The second step is crucial: do not escalate behind the other's back, but seek clarification together.
For the responsible parties to whom you escalate to be able to help quickly and effectively, it's important to be clear about what’s unclear (in my case, "should we prioritize upsells over activity in doubt?")
And finally, it's important that the superiors who clarify this question then do not take over everything, but leave responsibility where it belongs, as the PMs should again be able to take over their responsibility and continue.
I’ve written more about this topic here.
Final thoughts
To recap, we’ve covered what we mean by situational clarity, outlined some ways you can evaluate your current ability to provide situational clarity, and considered some specific tips and tactics that can help you gain more situational clarity.
And for the next post in the series, we’ll be looking at the topic of role clarity and what steps you can take to achieve it.