Organizational Cactus: How It May Be Killing Your Product (And What You Can Do About It)
In any company, you hear employees complain about the grunt work that makes their work feel less meaningful. Ever feel annoyed at having to submit a receipt for a $7 expense? Or perhaps you were venting to a colleague about having to create reports for management on a metric that you believe is irrelevant?
Organizational Cactus is the unnecessary friction in your company that makes work feel less meaningful.
No company is perfect. No matter where you work, you’ll always have some organizational friction. To product teams, these imperfections seem like thorns on a rose — it’s pain you deal with infrequently and avoid when you can. But it doesn’t detract from the meaning you find in your work.
In some organizations, you find that there is so much organizational friction that you’re spending more time (and emotional bandwidth) in dealing with the organizational friction than meaningful work. This is when instead of a rose with thorns, you have an organizational cactus on your hands.
Why Organizational Cactus is bad if you want to build great products:
To understand how your organizational cactus might be getting in the way, we first need to look at how high performing product teams make product decisions.
As a good product leader, you have a clear vision that you feel passionate about, but you’re also a realist. Every time you’re making a product decision, you’re balancing making progress towards your vision against the reality of business needs or survival. Whether made through intuition or by applying the Radical Product Thinking approach to prioritization, our decisions can be placed into one of the quadrants above.
The easiest decisions are the ones that help you make progress towards your vision while also meeting business needs (e.g. a feature that increases revenues). Occasionally, you spend resources investing in the vision to reap benefits in the long-term, for example when you spend 3 months refactoring code.
But what really pains you as a passionate product leader is when you have to take on Vision Debt. These are decisions that require you to compromise on your vision in exchange for short term gains. For example, if you’re asked to deliver a custom feature that only serves the needs of a single customer, you know that the custom feature might win a marquee customer in the short term. However, in the long-term, it’s going to be a distraction from making progress towards your vision.
When you care about your product, making compromises on the vision feels painful. As a result, you only take on items from the Vision Debt quadrant when truly necessary or strategic. Going back to the rose analogy, when you take on vision debt, it causes pain like thorns on a rose. Because you notice the pain, you avoid vision debt.
How Organizational Cactus affects product decisions
Organizational cactus causes pain all the time. If the product leader is spending most of her day navigating politics in the company that is getting in the way of doing the right thing for users, justifying decisions and getting bogged down with administrative details of reporting irrelevant metrics to her boss, she begins to realize that she has to pick her battles.
I often observe passionate PMs developing calluses to deal with the organizational cactus that pervades their workday. While this strategy helps them survive the day, it dulls their pain of taking on vision debt and compromising on the vision. This is often how good products go bad.
What you can do if you have cactus problem
1. Recognize the problem: Start by understanding the biggest sources of pain for your product teams that make their work feel less meaningful. From administrative paperwork to toxic environments, there may be different sources and levels of pain. Understand where your product teams are running into this pain and create a plan to trim this organizational cactus.
If your product teams are having trouble fighting for their products, the problem may not always lie with the teams. It may be that they need your help in trimming the organizational cactus so they don’t have to pick their battles.
2. Increase alignment within the organization: In many organizations, the process of getting buy-in from stakeholders is one of the biggest sources of organizational friction. Often the root cause is the lack of alignment. The team may even be aligned on a high-level vision, but the misalignment may be lurking in the details. To resolve these, you may want to engage in a group exercise. You can use this “Mad-Lib” format from the Radical Product Thinking methodology, to align on a more high-resolution vision.
3. Acknowledge vision debt: Use the shared vocabulary of vision debt to acknowledge whenever you’re compromising on your vision. Taking on vision debt is demoralizing to the team when it is unacknowledged. It makes the vision seem unimportant. Make sure you talk about why it pains you to take on vision debt and your rationale for taking it on. This will only feel authentic if it happens rarely and if (as when incurring any debt), you are thoughtful about the size of debt and how you’ll repay it.
Radical Product Thinking is a methodology for building game-changing products systematically. Since its launch in 2017, it has become a global movement and has been adopted by organizations including high-tech startups, nonprofits, and government agencies. You can download the free Radical Product Toolkit, a step-by-step guide that helps you put this methodology into practice.
