Great piece. I see this crop up often in teams across product, marketing, sales, and others, pretty universally. I hear often singular instances made plural — "customers are asking for", but when probed, really it's one customer asking about a thing we *project* will be of interest to others, too. It's the hidden projection piece we need…
Great piece. I see this crop up often in teams across product, marketing, sales, and others, pretty universally. I hear often singular instances made plural — "customers are asking for", but when probed, really it's one customer asking about a thing we *project* will be of interest to others, too. It's the hidden projection piece we need to expose to differentiate from the facts on the ground. The corporate game of telephone starts to twist the details of anything once it leaves the source, so we at least need the origin to be grounded in reality.
I don't think as part of product teams we *need* to have hard facts guiding every decision — it's impossible. But we should have intellectual honesty about claims vs. hiding the ball (or not having the rigor to even understand the claim).
Great piece. I see this crop up often in teams across product, marketing, sales, and others, pretty universally. I hear often singular instances made plural — "customers are asking for", but when probed, really it's one customer asking about a thing we *project* will be of interest to others, too. It's the hidden projection piece we need to expose to differentiate from the facts on the ground. The corporate game of telephone starts to twist the details of anything once it leaves the source, so we at least need the origin to be grounded in reality.
I don't think as part of product teams we *need* to have hard facts guiding every decision — it's impossible. But we should have intellectual honesty about claims vs. hiding the ball (or not having the rigor to even understand the claim).