A portal that needed to go mobile
I was heading up a profitable PC device portal product that had been stable for several years. I had just come from a similar industry that was churning through mobile and tablet viewing trends, so I could see the writing on the wall. We needed to rebuild our product for mobile devices before those trends started hurting the business.
My first instinct was to lead the change myself. I had seen this transition before, I understood the technical challenges, and I knew what needed to happen. But as I started on the strategy, I could see that dictating the new product direction would set up exactly the wrong dynamic in the organization.
To convince leadership to invest in a significant revamp, I needed more than a good plan. I needed people across several teams committed to it and eager to do it. So I gave my teams a challenge and let them come up with the direction.
I brought together experts from across the company: the UX leader, the engineering leader, the sales leader, and others. I presented the problem and kept my solution to myself. I shared the market data, explained the competitive threats, and asked them to dig into the mobile challenges and marketplace impacts themselves.
Each leader took ownership of a different part of the challenge. They started researching, trying ideas, and pitching new directions. I let the content team, design team, and tech teams experiment and make the mistakes we needed to make to learn what we needed to learn.
It went better than I expected in two ways. The direction we developed together was significantly better than what I would have suggested on my own. People with expertise I didn't have came up with solutions I never would have thought of.
And because the team members owned the future of the product along with me, all of us had a stake in seeing it succeed. When we presented the initiative to leadership, they saw a cross-team initiative with a lot of support and energy behind it, where they might have expected one product manager's proposal. The project was approved with enthusiasm and adequate resources. By giving away control over the solution, I had gained far more influence over the outcome than I could have by pushing my own plan.
Keeping the "what," giving away the "how"
Giving away control can just as easily produce chaos. A few specific choices kept that from happening here.
I kept the strategic direction and handed off the solutions. The only thing I held onto was the high-level problem: we need to be ready for mobile before these trends hit our business. The specific approach, the technical architecture, and the design direction went to people with better context than mine. The UX leader understood mobile interaction patterns I'd never thought about. The engineering lead saw infrastructure possibilities I would have missed. Keeping the "what" and giving away the "how" got me solutions better than anything I would have designed alone.
I also stayed in the room. Handing off the problem and walking away would have been abdication. I stayed involved by asking questions and holding back my answers. When the design team proposed an approach I was unsure about, I asked them to walk me through their reasoning and didn't override them. When early experiments failed, I made it clear that was expected and useful. The teams needed to know I cared whether they succeeded and wasn't just offloading my work.
And the right people got the credit. When we presented to leadership, every team leader spoke to their piece of the strategy, so it came across as a plan a cross-functional team had built together, with nobody playing a supporting role in "my" pitch. Leadership could see real commitment across the organization, and I don't know how a solo presentation, however polished, could have shown them that.
What would have happened if I'd pushed
If I had pushed my own strategy through, I might have gotten a decent outcome. I would also have been the single point of failure, the bottleneck for every decision, and the only person really committed to making it work.
Because the plan was theirs, the leaders I handed the problem to became advocates for the direction, problem-solvers when things went sideways, and leaders in their own right.