Impact can't bypass politics

The team was shipping well. The tech was feasible, the validation was strong, and a big milestone was in sight. Then the executive team put a question to us: which is more important, Feature A or Outcome A?

Feature A was the shiny one. In the executives' minds, it was what would win over the new clients still on the fence. Somewhere along the way, the feature and the outcome had folded into one thing, so choosing the feature felt like choosing the outcome.

I said: "I think we're getting our wires crossed. Just because this feature is a way we can achieve the revenue targets doesn't mean it's the only one. What are our other options?"

Opening that conversation up felt threatening at first. The feature had been talked about for a while, and it would have looked really slick. Some people can see real, high-impact work, and because it doesn't fit their mental model, it registers as a threat. A question about options can land the same way.

We chose a feature with less shine. It meant less manual work for people, and a shorter cycle for customers to pay us and ship their work. That throughput turned out to be the better bet. The product could serve 6x the customers, and that got us to revenue targets the other options on the table couldn't have reached.

The hardest part wasn't the execution. It was aligning people.

My friend and Impact-First Leadership co-author Matt LeMay wrote about this in The One-to-Three-Men Theory. His argument is that clear company goals often fail to steer decisions, because what steers them is whether the work caters to the egos of a few powerful people. You can't fix those egos. You can shape the culture around them until those people become the outliers.

In it, Matt mentions something I said to him: impact can influence politics, but it can't bypass politics.

Politics happens at every level, because at every level people have room to interpret. The same goal, number or feature can mean something different to each person who hears it. Politics is how those interpretations shape decisions, and impact-first work gives leaders leverage over it.

Building things and improving customer and business outcomes is product work. Strategy, alignment, budgets and people are leadership work. The gap between the two widens as a company grows, and a wider gap leaves more room to interpret.

Politics is the work of leaders.

In that room, the work was helping a group of smart people separate a feature from the outcome it was meant to buy.

Execution is cheaper in the age of AI, and executing the wrong thing costs more. When building was slower, there was time to pivot, or to meet and decide. Now a team can ship a roadmap's worth of the wrong direction by the end of the week, which is why strategic alignment matters. The cost doubles, because the same week could have gone on the right thing, shipped earlier and with more confidence.

When the shiny feature can be built quickly, it gets built, and whatever should have come first waits behind it.

People believe they have the right take, so the job of selling high-impact work is to stay focused on the goal and keep bringing the conversation back to it. If a feature takes the spotlight, ask questions about how it'll ladder up to the outcome everyone's working towards. If there's an assumed connection, just walk it through.

What brought our stakeholder over was walking through each way the feature he saw as essential wouldn't get us to the revenue target. The aim was for everyone to agree on the problem first, then on the levers that unblock it. Here, that meant revenue throughput, which changed the conversation and made the impact case easier to agree to. We both had impact in mind, just not at the same level.

And that feature we'd set aside? We shipped it later, and it landed as he predicted. It was the right thing to build, just not the best time.

John Cutler, who writes The Beautiful Mess, put it this way: "The biggest mistake people make about navigating corporate politics is that they believe it is about what you DO, instead of what you DON'T DO." The question in that room didn't argue against the feature, or against the people who wanted it. It asked what else could get there.

Bruce McCarthy, co-author of Aligned, defines alignment in a talk on aligning executive teams as "committing to a plan, even if you don't agree". That is a different thing from consensus. "You got to listen to all sides. But then somebody has to own making a decision and making it happen."

Impact framing is the tool: putting the outcome at the centre of the conversation, with more than one way to reach it. It asks leaders to take care over how the story is told, and how people are brought along.

At one job, a colleague warned me: "Don't show that number. That's a new number, and they'll pick it apart wondering where you got it from. It'll derail everything." That colleague saved the conversation, and helped us land the right facts at the right level.

Impact is decided when your stakeholders are echoing the outcomes you're all working towards, and there are several options on the table instead of a single feature.

Reply and tell me. I read every one.

One last thing, and it has nothing to do with product politics. QueerNext, a community bringing LGBTQIA+ people and allies in tech together for co-working days, talks and dinners, just launched their website after three years of growing by word of mouth. They asked nicely for backlinks, and I thought we should help them out. If that's your world, they're worth a look.

Thanks for reading.

Intentionaut is a fortnightly letter from Saielle DaSilva on design, product, data and AI. What's working, what isn't, and how to keep your bearings.

If this was useful, forward it to one person who'd get something from it. That's how it grows.

Saielle DaSilva
Putting the soft back in software