Does your IT-Team trust you?

Career AdviceWorking Life

Metrics are a great way to build trust and improve communication within your team and company.

The question is important to product managers because their job is to help improve the decision-making of a team. If the team around you doesn’t trust you, they aren’t drawing on your expertise when they make decisions.

If you want to be a successful PdM, you'll need to find ways to build trust with your team. So, how does one build trust? Some ways to build and keep trust are:

• Showing up.
• Communicating.
• Showing progress.

Your weekly work as a PdM should reflect these three things, and many more. Our roadmap lets us make promises and communicate changes, and our metrics show progress. All of this builds trust--when everything is going well. We all know that things don't always go according to plan. In product development, this means that a lot of our work will inevitably involve some degree of failure. Therefore, it is even more important for us to be able to communicate changes to the teams that depend on our results.

Being able to deliver bad news in a way that doesn't upset people is a very difficult skill to develop. So, what are some ways that we can prepare for this?

Survival metrics are key to success! We’ll see this in action by taking a trip to BobCo, where Jill, the product leader, is talking to Sheryl, one of the project managers, about an initiative that’s on its last legs. Sheryl's use of metrics and her ability to keep her team's trust despite project failure.

Survival Metrics for Trust

Survival metrics are a framework that can help product managers and teams make better decisions and improve their chances of success. By using survival metrics in your product development, you can ensure that your product development is on track by monitoring your progress against these simple terms. Sheryl's latest initiative was a huge success! She set up survival metrics and asked questions of the stakeholders to ensure that the initiative would be successful. Having a plan makes stakeholders comfortable and reminds the executor of the Getting Things Done approach, particularly the “Next Action” principle.

The most important metric for the project was listed first, and it contained a reference to company values:

STOP — If the outcome of the initiative has to become specialized to specific target groups, then shut it down. We build for all of our customers, not some.

The news that the initiative had to become specialized came as a blow. What's more, it would only be effective with some of their favorite customers, not providing any value to others. The data are just data, but what are they worth if you don't use them? It was time to shut down the initiative. Sheryl had a coffee meeting with Jill, and their discussion was less about what to do and more focused on summoning the confidence to do what needed to be done.

Jill smiled when she heard the story.

“We’re going to turn this crisis into an opportunity. I need you to help me by going over the data and coming up with a story that will show everyone that we still believe in our values. We’ll use your survival metrics and some of the data you gathered to make our case.” Sheryl replied with a nod.

Playing Back Important Data

"Most ideas don't improve the metrics they were intended to improve." - Ron Kohavi

Failure is unavoidable. It will come sometime.

Acknowledge failure immediately when it happens. Don't skip over mistakes. We need to take the time to do things right the first time, even if it's hard. Being prepared for the worst case scenario gives you the power to survive any situation.

Ask these questions to get the metrics that inform your team:

What would it take to get full buy-in from the team on this initiative?

What are some things that the team/company absolutely needs?

How much are we willing to sacrifice for this initiative?

The work that goes into getting these metrics is just as important as the metrics themselves. It helps us understand what makes the organization work, and what goes wrong. When something goes wrong, it's vital to inform the people who need to know first. Like that, Sheryl sent a message to relevant stakeholders:

Hello everyone,

The implemented STOP Metric has been hit. The initiative has to become specialized to be effective. Therefore we will be stopping the project immediately.The team will prepare everything for a Q&A session to determine what we're going to do next.

Jill was right: There was no reason to wait to break this news. And the work wasn't just on Sheryl. The postmortem was the whole team's responsibility. That way, the things that the product development team learned wouldn't be siloed into individual disciplines.

The team used their digital spaces to turn the research into a workshop, discussing their thinking and trying to come up with a way to get to the stop decision sooner.

"You're going to fail, and that's okay. What's important is that you learn from your mistakes and figure out how to do better next time."

Telling the story

After analyzing the data, we can tell a story that will help the team understand what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.

Turning the newly discovered into a story that tells the following:

1. Best outcome - what do we want to achieve

2. Problems - what held us up/made us fail?

3. Lesson - What did we learn from it?

This practice is a great way to make your information digestible for people in the room and for those who want to learn later.

Some additional things that can be done:

1. Use company artefacts and anecdotes from stakeholders to build trust in your brand.

2. Once you’ve identified the main takeaway with your teams, repeat it over and over.

3. Show emphasis. How do we proceed from here?

Getting this clarity will help you communicate your vision to stakeholders and ensure that any questions they have are relevant.

The key lesson Sheryl learned was that they need to diversify their discovery pool. Before the presentation started, she gave the stakeholders 10 minutes to read through a one-page summary that she provided, giving a short introduction to why the team chose this metric and a timeline of the initiative. Then she jumped right in and delivered an impactful presentation. BobCo is really focused on making things for everyone. The CEO was burned by specialization at his last company and now talks about it often. Sheryl led the presentation with examples of him talking about the evils of specialization and then added some supporting materials from the head of business development and the director of customer success. Then she repeated the importance of diversification and how taking what was available, instead of building the right participant pools led to this being done late.

It's not always easy to find the right people to talk to, but it's worth it. We closed on how the team will be pushing to ABR (“always be recruiting”) to keep research in front of them and where the information from the presentation will be available. The team didn’t want to be in this same position again, and they also wanted to experiment with randomization to ensure they eliminated thier own bias in selection.

The Q&A session quickly became about how the company could improve its research, rather than focusing on failure. The focus was on how the team could become better.

Jill was excited to receive an email from the director of customer support, who was full of praise for Sheryl and her team.

Heighten Trust

People need to be able to trust you if you want to be successful. Even if you fail, using metrics can help you improve like this:

• Showing up.
• Communicating.
• Showing progress.

As a product manager, you will inevitably face challenges and difficult decisions. However, by maintaining transparency and communicating effectively, you can help build trust within the organization and avoid stagnation.