Creating the Game Mechanics
Defining guardrails to manage complexities, uncertainty, and dynamic circumstances
Autumn is on the horizon! 🍂 If you’re celebrating Labour Day, hope you’re enjoying the long weekend.
In this post, I’ll focus on guardrails, starting at the personal level. Then, I’ll share my lessons learned on establishing guardrails at the team and organization levels.
Which of my personal guiding principles resonate with you? If you enjoy this post, consider subscribing.
🤔 Why are guardrails important?
Guardrails are the rules, requirements, boundaries, values, or criteria a business puts into place to ensure it operates in a zone the company is comfortable with.
Guardrails are important because they:
Enable rapid, consistent, decision-making across the organization—no matter who the individual or team making the decision is;
Provide a means by which to focus efforts, energy, and time; and
Provide visibility and transparency into how decisions get made.
❎ Personal guardrails
Working from home at a startup has resulted in me having to establish some personal guardrails with work.
🤺 Boundaries
Boundaries are the rules and limits we set for ourselves in interpersonal relationships.
Setting and maintaining boundaries helps us to:
Prevent or eliminate burnout
Have a healthy balance between work and the rest of our lives
Maintain interest in our work over time
Just because you set a boundary doesn’t guarantee everyone else will immediately abide by it. If a coworker oversteps a boundary, gently remind them of said boundary. Repeat this reinforcing loop until the boundary is solidified.
🔥 HealthyGamerGG has a fantastic lecture about burnout, its symptoms, and common factors of working burnout.
🧠 Mental health and wellness
The state of mental health around the world is going downhill.
Without getting into too much detail, here are some staggering statistics:
21% of adults in the United States experienced mental illness in 2020—that’s 1 in 5 adults (National Alliance on Mental Illness).
Suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among youth and young adults between 15 to 29 years old (World Health Organization.
Here are some things that have helped me take care of my mental health:
Educate myself in this area. HealthyGamerGG is my go-to resource for all things mental health and wellness.
Find supportive tribes. Fighting the battle alone is exhausting. Our mental health is a personal experience and journey; however, that doesn’t mean you have to take care of yourself by yourself.
Talk about my mental health with coworkers. Of course, I do so to the extent to which I feel comfortable. It turns out a lot of us experience—or have experienced—similar struggles.
Seek professional help. In my last semester of university, I made use of my engineering faculty’s counselling services. Having a sounding board to share thoughts and feelings with made me feel less alone. It also gave me an outsider’s perspective on how to go about processing my thoughts and feelings so I could move on with my life without the emotional baggage that accumulates over time.
🥘 Food for thought: What about setting and maintaining personal boundaries with your work do you find to be the most challenging?
🛤️ Getting started with guardrails at your organization
One of the first guardrails that must be set by a company’s executive leadership or founding team (or equivalent) is the company mission.
💡 Company mission: a brief, broad statement about the organization’s goals and how it intends to meet those goals (Investopedia).
Ideally, the company mission is framed around a significant enough problem to be solved for a particular group of people that the problem impacts.
That company mission becomes everyone’s North Star, or our lighthouse on a safe shore, as the company navigates tumultuous seas, turbulent winds, and rugged storms as everyone strives to breathe life into the mission.
🤝 Trust in people and mutual respect for expertise before all else
From Harvard Business Review’s Management Tip of the Day on April 1, 2022:
[…] Trust is foundational to any developmental relationship and requires even greater intentionality in virtual mediums.
Particularly after more than 2.5 years (and still counting) of living through a globally traumatic experience that is the COVID-19 pandemic, it can feel difficult or even risky to trust others.
Some ways I build trust with my teammates at all levels:
Be human first. Each of us is much more than our job title. We all have lives outside of work. Get to know each and every teammate as people—to the extent they’re comfortable with sharing, of course. As you’re waiting for folks to join a meeting, engage in a bit of small talk. Ask folks how they’re doing. Ask them about their families, hobbies, interests, etc. Crack a joke. Share a meme you came across that you thought might make them laugh. Follow up on important life events that they mentioned to you in previous conversations. For example: “How did the parent-teacher conference go?”, “How is moving places going?”
Assume good intent. If you hear something that triggers an initial, unpleasant feeling, lean into your curiosity, and treat this conversation as a learning opportunity.
Be honest. I ask questions when I don’t understand what is being asked of me or when goals aren’t explicit enough for me to take action. I admit when I don’t have full context or all the available, desirable-to-know information behind a decision I’m about to make. I emphasize that this decision is the best I could come up with given the limited, known information.
Honour my commitments. Complete what I’ve agreed to by the agreed-upon date. If other things come up that require my immediate attention, raise this and ask for clarification on my priorities.
Communicate effectively. If we need to shift priorities or revert a decision due to new information we’ve received, communicate that to your teammates and stakeholders so they know why things are changing.
Be vulnerable, and own up to my mistakes or shortcomings. As a leader, if you legitimately make a mistake and openly own up to it, that gives others the impression that it’s safe for them to seek support when they lack clarity, have questions about the goals or a particular task at hand, or ask for mentoring/coaching on a specific problem or situation. This is better for themselves, the team, and the company as a whole when folks feel safe and comfortable with admitting, “I don’t know,” “I’m not sure,” or “I need help.”
Be helpful. Check-in with your teammates regularly and ask how they’re doing, both on the work and personal front. If they’re experiencing any blockers on the work front that they cannot remove themselves, do whatever is in your power to unblock them, such as looping in their line manager.
✨ Creating a safe environment for diversity, individuality, and creativity
Trust must exist between individuals, teams, and leadership for a company to create an environment that enables everyone to be themselves, feel safe, be heard, and discover their best selves—personally and professionally.
Product development is a multi-faceted skill set and not one single person or even one single team will have all the information or competencies to bring a product successfully to market.
That is why you want to inspire everyone to grow—both as individuals and altogether.
We all have a wealth of experiences that shape our perspectives and approaches to work, such as:
Academic knowledge, through formal schooling and continual professional development;
Experiential knowledge, through life and work, mentoring, coaching, networking; and
Cultural and social knowledge, through our life experiences with respect to interpersonal relationships, our larger social circles around us, and our community.
🟣 Brainstorming guardrails holistically
First, creating guardrails requires a thorough understanding of and collective alignment on your company’s foundation so that you can easily litmus test new ideas to immediately know if they will move your company in the direction towards it wants to evolve.
This foundation starts with your company's mission. Other key pieces are your product vision and product strategy.
Connect with individuals 1-on-1, and prioritize cultivating your relationships.
Make an effort to get to know your direct team members, leadership team, and stakeholders personally as whole people (not just their work self) on a 1-1 level.
Talk with your teammates individually to understand their concerns, questions, uncertainties, and fears. Most folks are a lot more comfortable sharing more intimate thoughts with someone they trust.
Take notes to consolidate what you learn. Synthesize information over time.
Focus on making progress and learning over achieving perfection.
The product is growing. Individuals and teams are growing and learning. The organization is growing and learning. You are learning about yourself and each of those aforementioned components of the system.
Folks should be able to exercise creativity and flexibility and incorporate continuous learning to pivot towards higher-quality outcomes.
Improving over iterations, over time, is key.
Help folks understand how different pieces fit together and work together.
Each individual has a different capacity for dealing with change and complexity. Help everyone understand:
What are the main activities that are absolutely necessary and will be ever-present in some shape or form?
Why are these activities important?
How do these activities play together? What are the interrelationships between them? In what situations may these activities appear to be at odds with one another?
Create an environment that lets everyone feel safe, be themselves, and be heard.
Normalize giving and receiving feedback. To start, ask for feedback regularly from your teammates. Be receptive to all feedback. However, remember that does not mean you have to accept and act on all feedback.
Create team working agreements (also known as Ways of Working documents).
Team working agreements establish expectations of each other explicitly and transparently.
For starters, you can consider creating a working agreement for meetings. As examples, basic rules can be:
The roles and responsibilities of a facilitator and a note-taker;
Assigning a facilitator before kicking off each meeting;
How to encourage everyone to participate in a discussion. For example: the facilitator passes the mic, encourages quiet voices to speak up, and goes around in the group circle; and
How decisions are made.
🧠 Check out Scrum Alliance’s article on how to facilitate a team working agreement workshop.
Make time for regular retrospectives.
This provides a forum for the whole team to reflect on how you’re working altogether.
🧠 Learn more about retrospectives and how to facilitate them from PagerDuty’s official retrospectives documentation.
Fun fact: I wrote this guide while I interned with PagerDuty!
Have patience and empathy.
We all carry baggage from our past life and work experiences.
Particularly if an organization is transitioning from a more top-down, autocratic management style to a more empowered management style, folks aren’t going to immediately know how to operate in this changing environment.
Meet folks where they currently are and help them feel supported along the way as the organization navigates any type of cultural shift.
Start with the big picture, then zoom in and zoom back out periodically.
Think about the big rocks in the end-to-end, cyclical nature of product development, from discovery all the way to learning from feedback.
Once everyone has brainstormed and agreed on the big rocks, flesh out the details for phases within the product development lifecycle with the relevant subject matter experts.
Don’t forget to come back altogether, to ensure everyone understands the interfaces between cross-functional individuals or teams, such as:
Information exchanges;
The formats in which information is exchanged, such that the relevant parties understand how to parse the information;
Communication channels and frequencies; and
Opportunities and forums for sharing insights or providing feedback to each other.
🥘 Food for thought: What other principles for establishing team and organizational guardrails would you add?
💭 Reviewing new opportunities and deciding what to do with them
Inevitably, you will discover unmet, unaddressed, or under-addressed needs or pain points.
These are some lenses through which you can evaluate new opportunities for your product and make decisions about how best to proceed with them.
Review your company’s mission and your team’s goals.
How might (or might not) this new opportunity sit with your product vision and product strategy? Do you even have enough information to assess this with enough confidence?
What problem is this opportunity really trying to solve? Can your organization solve it uniquely in a way that resonates and sticks with your users, customers, and larger target market?
Have a conversation with whoever brought up the opportunity to understand the motivation behind their ask.
Estimate the projected value of the new opportunity.
How might it impact your users? Which segment of users?
How might it impact the business? What about the product as it stands today?
Is this a good opportunity to invest time towards further evaluation or to actually work on? How might it add or subtract value?
What do you and the business have to lose if you don’t pursue this opportunity?
Understand the potential risks that come with this opportunity.
Business value risks.
How might it add or take away from the differentiated value proposition? From the vision for the product? How might it introduce unnecessary complexity to it?
How might it impact how you package your solution?
How might it impact your pricing model?
User value risks.
What benefit are you delivering to your users? Is this a first-order, second-order, or nth-order benefit tied with your value proposition?
Knowledge risks.
What are your team’s competencies and skill sets?
What is the unfamiliar territory? Subject matter? Technology?
Ethical risks.
What are its ethical or moral implications?
Will this really benefit your users and customers? What might be unintended consequences that can arise?
Legal risks.
What are the legal or regulatory requirements? Constraints?
Understand your current capacity.
What does your current product roadmap look like?
Which milestones do you need to hit?
What strategic initiatives are currently in-flight within the organization? What initiatives might be happening later down the road?
How might it impact the current product roadmap?
What is your team’s current bandwidth?
How much would it cost to validate, build, test, release, maintain, and support?
🥘 Food for thought: With which lens do you initially evaluate new opportunities? How come?
📏 Measuring success
Making decisions about your product based on quantitative, qualitative, or both types of data is integral. However, be careful about taking this to an extreme and ignoring your or others’ intuitions or judgments, or “product sense” as this set of competencies is more commonly referred to in the product world.
Shreyas Doshi, startup advisor, former product manager and leader at companies like Stripe, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, has a fascinating Twitter thread about product sense with additional resources.
Coming up with metrics that matter for your product comes down to:
Knowing your company’s business model,
Knowing the ins and outs of your product, and
Relating variables in your product back to your company’s business model.
Some of my go-to resources are as follows:
North Star Playbook from Amplitude
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Eigenquestions: The Art of Framing Problems by Shishir Mehrotra and Matt Hudson
These are my guiding principles for using data to measure the success of my product:
Have a clear understanding of why a certain metric or attribute is looked at.
Consider the meaning behind a metric going up or down, or changing over time.
If you struggle to imagine what action your team might take in response to a change in a metric, you may want to reconsider the value of tracking this metric.
Use quantitative data to inform decisions about the product. However, it might not tell the full story on its own. In many cases, you may need qualitative data to more accurately contextualize the quantitative results you’re seeing.
Listen to your judgment, common sense, intuition, and instincts. They exist for a reason.
⚙️ Processes
These are my guiding principles for creating good processes:
Start with a solid understanding of your company’s foundation—that is, the company mission and goals, and product vision and strategy.
Make processes as simple as possible. Focus on clearly defining the inputs, outputs, and the information being exchanged during “handoffs” over defining each and every task in the process.
Provide transparency so everybody within the organization can understand where Product Development is in the process at any given time.
Iterations of the process should be easy to communicate, and folks can easily understand the thing that needs to change and why it needs to change. Aim to make it easy for people to adopt the change.
Foster collaboration, not inhibit it.
Enable efficient decision-making and collaborative work.
Big rocks
The engineering design cycle provides a good enough starting point for figuring out the main buckets of activities that need to happen to make progress towards your team or your company’s goals.
A couple of important reminders:
Start with your foundation—the company mission and business goals, which cascade down into the product vision and product strategy.
Research includes the following—but isn’t limited to:
Market research—reading industry papers or reports; speaking with industry analysts.
User research—conducting surveys, questionnaires, and interviews. As you evolve, you can make use of feedback in the form of sales force feedback and Customer Support analysis, too.
As you iterate and improve, learn about:
Your target market, users, and customers, and how your product meets, doesn’t meet, or falls short of meeting their needs.
How to improve collaboration and team-specific, org-wide, or both levels of operations.
🔑 Key takeaways
We covered a lot of ground today! If you only take away a few main ideas, let them be:
Above all else, put yourself and your well-being first.
In your team or organization, start with a solid foundation. If one does not yet exist, create it collaboratively with your leadership, stakeholders, and teammates.
Use your influence and span of control to make your workplace a safe, pleasant, and even fun place to exist and grow in.
For more anecdotes about my adventures in product management and product development, follow me on Twitter: @tiffanyyhchang
Share your biggest takeaway in the comments below. 👇
If you have questions or something you’d be interested in learning about from my experiences to date, leave them in the comments below, too!