Mice cried, pricked, but continued to gnaw cactus

This note is about an unpleasant situation, which I personally got into not so long ago. The described problem and the experience gained in solving it are especially valuable, due to the fact that I visited two guises: the status of a senior developer — a project manager for developing product features, and later at the rank of a head of software development department. In short, the problem can be stated as: how to change the attitude of employees to the product that they do, especially if the attitude is bad, and the product does not have a better reputation.

A little clarify the introductory. We are talking about an employee of an average or large company that produces replicable software, which has a non-zero audience (about 100 or more customers paid money for it), has been on the market for several years (at least 2-3 years) and has some kind of reputation.

At once I will make a reservation that further reasoning will not be about the external reputation of the product, which sales, marketing and PR often form, in order to powder the client’s brain. Any external product review should not be taken for granted, and there are a lot of reasons for this. Here are just one of them:

• A review can be written by marketing your company, which is very common and normal;
• A review can be a “black PR” of your competitors (and this is also normal);
• The review is simply incompetent. An example, the client did not understand your product and wrote that your CRM does not know how to hammer nails, or an inexperienced marketer started comparing your online Task Manager with Excel ...

But this is not about this, but about the internal attitude of the team to the product, i.e. about what the people themselves say about the product, who make it in full-time mode, earn it a living. I’ll clarify that this is also not related to the product of other departments of the company, otherwise you need to take into account external factors (for example, competition, envy).

A couple of words about why I thought the problem is relevant. After all, directly or indirectly, it is confirmed by external factors. For example, at technical conferences and forums, some representatives of large companies (not all !!!) often react to reasonable attacks against their products rather aggressively. The larger the company and the longer the product is on the market, the harder it is to maintain its internal reputation and maintain high morale in the team working on it. I will not discuss this topic further, because About this already recently wrote to Habré.
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With the production figured out. What to do? Let's first visit the shoes of an “ordinary” employee.

Developer and Cactus

I worked in the department related directly to the development of replicable software, which had a lot of problems. Attitude to him, as well as morality in the team, were appropriate. How did this manifest to ordinary employees and managers of the department? When talking about the quality of a program in an informal conversation, instead of answering, the respondent saw a downcast gaze, a nervous chuckle, a low-mooing or convulsive attempt to snap. Everyone considered it his duty to add firewood to the furnace, i.e. cursing the product was just fashionable even inside the team. In general, the title of the article perfectly describes the situation that I got into ... What is there to do in such a situation to a “man from a plow”, that is, an ordinary employee?

First of all, it is worth asking the management whether it is aware of the current internal problem and whether it has an idea how this situation can be solved. After all, for an ambitious professional can be an interesting challenge to return the product to a competitive state, provided there is a clear strategy for its future development. It is important not to be mistaken in the face from which you demand these answers. It is unlikely that this should be the company's president or CEO, because in large companies, as a rule, they are not aware of such "earthly" problems. The higher the leadership rank, the less his awareness. But this must be reconciled. In our case, besides me, there were a couple of curious employees, and there was also someone to ask. We did not get a clear answer, but we made the managers think about it, which, I think, moved the process from the dead end.

If you didn’t get a clear plan for getting out of the situation, or it simply doesn’t exist, then you already have the urge to search for a new job or you will remain a mouse from the article title. Unfortunately, many of our group of “activists”, without waiting, did just that ... Although exceptions are possible here. For example, in the Russian market there are many examples of far from the most outstanding products of a different class, which have not been developed for several years and are supported in the mode of patches and supports. At the same time, they feel great financially and are not going to bend anything (at least in the foreseeable future).

The product patch-and-development department is well suited for people looking for a safe haven in the raging IT world. All this is a solution for ordinary employees, but then we will consider a more constructive approach.

Manager and cactus

From the above it follows that the key role in solving this problem lies with the manager (head of department or product manager). Now we got into his skin and look at the problem from a different point of view, which is what happened to me.

First of all, the manager has more opportunities to look at the situation from a different angle, because Ordinary employees do not always have enough breadth of sight or information to compare their offspring with competitors, and they simply follow public opinion by inertia. Realizing this, we had to make every effort to study the market of competitors, trends, and also try to identify the key problems from the sea of ​​negativity formed around our cactus.

Secondly, after receiving adequate information, if reality has not yet discouraged your desire to change the situation, you need to use the following advice - “force yourself and others to face harsh facts in the face”. This is a phrase from Jim Collins’s Good to Great. In a situation where everything around you is breathing negatively and cannot wait until you screw it up, it is not easy. After all, the instinct of self-preservation or subtle mental organization of developers can simply prevent one day to throw everything on the subordinates. For me, the main argument was that by and large there was nothing to lose, so it would be difficult to spoil the stalemate. We must talk about problems to all team members all the time (almost every more or less large meeting I start with), because people tend to run away from major problems and do what they like or do better. Do not forget to talk about the advantages of the product without unnecessary sentiment. One practical tip is great help in this matter. Only daily using your product, you can feel yourself in the shoes of the user. Ideal to implement their software at the company level. If this is difficult, then at least adapt it for the personal use of employees.

The third step is to form the vision and strategy of the product or to get it done. After the first step, it will be easier to do this.

The key role in this vision becoming part of the corporate spirit and being conveyed to all participants in the process is played by the charisma and motivation of the manager. For example, I am sure that the first thing we suggested to everyone as a strategy was far from being the best way that many people still disagree with it internally, but the enthusiasm with which it was done could not but have a positive effect on the general mood. collective.

Instead of conclusion

Two more interesting moments that I noted for myself:

• Not always the problem can be solved by applying these tips in its pure form. For example, chance helped us develop a strategy. Leaving a company is a product manager, to whom I, while still RP to design one of the features, raised questions about the concept of development. After that, the concept had to be taken personally by the general director, which is also not about Feng Shui, but we entered a constructive dialogue. And now there is no product manager (which in itself is of course bad), but the “internal reputation” of the product in the company has become much better ...
• Often the problem is not in software that is made from scratch or that was inherited, but in the heads of the people working with it. Even before these events, we ourselves have changed a lot in our development processes, which led to an improvement in quality and increased the speed of product delivery, but have not yet begun to change the attitude to the product, no one just noticed.

And the result was the following: it was not fashionable to scold our cactus, and if the outbreaks of negative begin, they quickly turn into a plane of argued argument. In other words, the mice do not cry, the cactus is also not so prickly. There is even hope that it will bloom sooner or later ...

But not everything is so rosy, because having solved one problem, I ran into another, more global one. In most cases, the product is positioned and, worst of all, sold and actually used by customers incorrectly! Figuratively speaking, our cactus is trying to eat instead of potatoes, plentifully watering sauce ... Now I understand that in fact this was the key problem initially. But about this in a separate article. I hope, experience and advice will be useful, and there are something to supplement.