Vignette

Marketing gets them in ➡️ Product keeps them in ➡️ Service wins their trust

What? (Premise, Context)

“Complex systems tend to produce complex responses (not solutions) to problems.” — John Gall

One of the biggest challenges working in product is getting people to hear you, listen to you, and believe you. To that end, researchers twist themselves into 🥨 trying to serve as credible actors to gain influence in organizations that are often structured to deflect interpretation and understanding. And while it’s important for ICs to recognize they’re not the organization’s top priority, sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

With this familiar context, this case describes an initiative to expose veiled warnings at a simulated product flight test, which amounted to a warning call for my teams to reconsider what they thought they knew about what they thought they were learning. More specifically, this warning call represented a hermeneutic event: a transformative cycle of questioning, understanding, and reinterpretation of meaning within a specific situation or experience. Put more plainly, this is an expository account of how I tackled an organization’s complex responses to gather more information before resolving conflicts of perception, communication, and expectations. I did this:

• In an unorthodox, emergent way

• Without the benefit of consulting a manager / director

• In challenging business environment and information landscape

Now what? (Strategy, Actions)

The trained research eye sees things that others don't. While embracing the prefigurative notion that the best defense is a strong offense — and while recognizing that learning in systems with time delays doesn’t come naturally to some — I formed a comprehensive view of the veiled warnings by weaving together elements of:

• Backcasting

• Risk mitigation

• Emergent strategy

• Philosophy of science

• Research democratization

• Decision making frameworks

• Underutilized rhetorical persuasion techniques

• The theory of graceful extensibility — see Figure 1.

• Forms of non-verbal communication (paralanguage)

• The subtle, yet inescapable presence of biases in research theater

• The law of fluency, which states: “‘Well’ adapted activity occurs with a facility that belies the difficulty of the demands resolved and the dilemmas balance.”

So what? (Value Adds, Impacts)

In the end, I effected a dynamic compromise with the CEO, who helped me actualize a $9,000,000 test laboratory. (This represents the positive capability.) This, in turn…

• Reduced cycle times by 56%

• Helped me gain cross-functional allies

• Exposed a problem the organization didn’t know it had

• Socialized more rigorous rigorous research on recurring bases

• Enhanced product sensibility and trust among flight operators

• Enabled engineers and their managers to develop solutions more reliably

• Improved organizational communication by connecting knowledge across teams

• Successfully launched the company’s first research service and knowledge infrastructure

• Extended my teams’ abilities to mobilize and maneuver when surprises occurred when adaptive behaviors were saturated