202206171206 Delivery Performance vs Value Delivery

An alternate title for this essay is The "How" Matters.

I want to talk more about performance — the act of executing, building, delivering, how our team works together and with other teams, and how these stack up against our potential.

I don't want to stop talking about product value — the product, its value, our direction, how we choose what to build, or if what we built was valuable or not.

I just want to additionally talk more about performance.

Here's the way we typically talk about the product, its value, and our performance.

At an individual level you know if you’re doing a good job based on how effectively you’re contributing.

At a team level you see if the things the team built were valuable over a longer period of time.

Directors and executives plan for years out and it can take a long time to get feedback about the value of their decisions.

Therefore, we can’t know as easily or quickly if leaders (or groups of people as a whole) are doing a good job over these long, ambiguous timelines

See 202104291527 Live in the ambiguity and 202104291528 Leaders have to accept a slower feedback loop for more support of this position.

This is true. At the same time, this is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking specifically about performance, execution, and the act of delivering something regardless of what that something is.

A problem with the “typical” line of reasoning outlined above is that it results in an erroneous assumption that individual performance of a leader becomes increasingly divorced from the mechanics of how their team is operating. Instead, it argues that they can only be evaluated on whether the things that were done during their leadership were valuable to the organization.

We end up in this terrible place where all we talk about is what’s being done, how to measure the value of the product, and what we should do in the future. What we don’t evaluate is the core (dys)function of the teams.

More concretely, say a company makes a bet that Product X is going to be great and allocates all of their engineers to building it. Whether or not Product X ends up being valuable is not the same as whether or not the engineering organization did well delivering it. These are separate, overlapping responsibilities of leaders.

Let’s continue this example on two different extreme paths to further the point.

Product X ends up being a massive flop, but the engineers worked together seamlessly at the limit of their sustainable velocity to deliver a high quality, reliable, implementation of Product X. The group performance should be graded as excellent. The vision, strategy, or experiment’s product value should be graded as a failure.

On the other hand, let’s say Product X becomes a massive success, but the teams didn't communicate well, missed deadlines, were overstaffed for the effort, and delivered a low-quality, buggy implementation. The group performance should be graded as terrible even though the product value was excellent.

Why then, do we most often see the opposite? If the product does well, no one cares how we got there. If the product is a flop, then we were bad at our jobs regardless of whether that's true. I think there are a few reasons.

First, obviously some of the decision making that leads to good or bad product value is part of our jobs as leaders. There are also portions of the delivery process for the product that could impact the product value. Since performance and product value overlap, it can be hard to separate things and we might make mistakes attributing causality.

Second (less charitably), people don’t want to be accountable for bad results. If the product value was low, no one who had the idea wants to stand up and say “my idea was bad and we wasted time and money trying it”. Instead, we look around for excuses to blame for the lack of value — “we didn’t build it right, those engineers made a bad product”.

On the other hand, if it went well but the team hated every minute of it, we just as likely avoid that unsavory truth and say, “Look at how much value my idea brought to the company. Good job team.”

Third, frank discussions about performance are really hard. Getting a group together and saying something like “we should be able to do more work than we do” or “there are some fundamental dysfunctions that we have as a team of individuals that we need to iron out” is not easy. An executive or director getting a team of leaders together and saying “your team isn’t pulling its weight” or “your two groups are on different pages and need to get aligned” is a minefield. Nobody wants to hear these things, nobody wants to be the one to say them, and certainly nobody wants to have to do the hard work to fix them.

It’s much easier to look forward to what we’re planning next or be critical of intangible, ethereal product value (whose measurement methods are dubious at best #thread) than it is to be critical of others, have tough conversations, and be open to similar feedback about our own performance.

Fourth, it’s a heck of a lot easier to talk about product value and whether or not “the line is going up” than it is to actually build things.

Good 202104291523 Leadership is hard work over long periods of time with high accountability, responsibility, and stakes. Good leadership is about constant improvement. Good leadership is about being self-reflective on how you, your team, and the organization around you is doing: being open to knowing we can do better. On the other hand, it’s tremendously easy to be a bad leader. In fact, I believe one of the easiest jobs in the world is being a bad leader even at the executive level. #thread

We can coast in an organization that is doing well and growing, without our group actually achieving much of anything. Everyone gets regular pats on the back, shout-outs to the organization, and told to keep it up. We feel like we’re doing well even though timelines are meaningless, quality is low, vision is non-existent, and ownership is hoarded territorially.

Organizations that tolerate performative leadership are terminally ill #thread. How could any member of the organization trust anything that the org does when it’s obvious that rewards are doled out for proclaiming victory when there was none? How can contributors feel heard or valued when their lives are miserable but the product is making the company money so the organization doesn’t care?

Here’s a simple litmus test to identify performative leadership. Ask a team or leader if you can help them achieve the things they are saying they’re working on or claiming are making their jobs difficult. Ask what needs to be done, take accountability for deadlines and whether it actually finishes or not. If you’re met with hostility instead of openness or naysaying instead of excitement, that team is likely uninterested in actually making any progress. Instead they’re interested in having something to talk about that isn’t important, that will slowly happen over a long period of time so that they can continue to be drip-fed praise.

There are some honest mistakes and little foibles in this list, but there is a steaming pile of avoidance and bad leadership too. This is why we must talk about performance as well as product value. Only focusing on product value allows us to hide from hard work, avoid uncomfortable truths, and pretend we’re doing a great job anyway.