Seventeen years (and three weeks) ago, my husband and I talked for the first time.
We have spent over a third of our lives together and most of our adult years. I can proudly share that we have been happily married ever since.
A happy marriage probably means different things to different people, though.
I recently discovered the concept of the Five Love Languages. The concept says that there are different ways in which individuals express and receive love. These languages are words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. Each person typically has a primary and a secondary language. We don’t all “speak” the whole five, and surely not all the time.
As soon as I read about it, I could relate. My primary love language is definitely words, and my secondary is acts of service. I got the latter at home when I grew up. My parents would go above and beyond to help me and my sisters and keep us happy. My father once drove two hours north and back to the manufacturer of my sister’s contact lenses and then four hours south and back the next day to bring my sister her new lenses after her old ones broke. My mother, over 75 now, still speaks lovingly about how her father would have taken the book from her bed and turned the lights off after she fell asleep reading as a teenager. I remember sitting by my desk learning until midnight when a warm cup of coffee landed right next to me without even asking.
These are my love languages, but my husband has other ones. I needed to learn his in order to show him love the way he wanted, and I needed to teach him mine, so I get what I needed. When it comes to acts of service or simply running a home together, I learned that I do need to ask.
But simply asking is not enough. Over a decade ago, when I casually asked him to do something and moved on to doing other things, he called me and wanted to talk. He told me that I was the love of his life and that he would do anything for me, but he needed to know why. It was an eye-opening moment. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do things for me, but he did need more context when I asked.
Rarely do you get such a clear explanation of what your spouse needs from you, and this one was both clear and easy. I embraced it immediately.
As product leaders, we ask people – who are mostly not our relatives – to do things all the time. If our loved ones need to know why we are asking before they do what we asked for, it makes perfect sense that our colleagues would need at least the same, if not more.
However, knowing that they need it is obviously not enough since so many product leaders fail to explain the context and rush to the bottom line. Here are the three steps to follow to make sure you explain the ‘why’ well.
It’s Hard but Worth It
Explaining the ‘why’ is already fairly well established when writing product requirements. The entire user story structure is meant to include the ‘why’ as a built-in part of the requirement.
But even if you master that at the requirement level, at the strategy and roadmap level that’s an entirely different thing. I see product leaders struggling with explaining the ‘why’ even to themselves, and even the ones who have a clear understanding of the ‘why’ are often skipping it when they share their thoughts.
Explaining to your colleagues why you want to lead in a certain direction helps you in multiple ways. It builds trust and makes it easier for them to follow you. It helps them gain a deeper understanding of what you meant, so they don’t need you to figure out every little detail (you basically plant the seeds of your ideas in your audience so they can grow the tree you want independently). And it simply helps them remember better because that’s how people are built.
The following three steps are like a muscle that you can train, and you don’t have to wait for strategic roadmap discussions to do so. You can practice it almost in any interaction where you ask people to do something. Trust me, if you commit to doing this with any request you have, it will become second nature very soon.
- Ask the Right Questions
You would think that in order to explain the ‘why,’ you need to ask yourself ‘why?’ to find the answer. But ‘why’ is not the right question to ask at the strategic level, and generally, when you want to convince someone that you are doing the right thing.
Technology is like a superpower. It can do (almost) anything you want it to do. But that means that there are infinite options, and selecting the right one becomes trickier.
With that in mind, the right question to ask yourself is not a simple ‘Why do you want to do X?’ but rather ‘Why did you choose to do X when you could do anything?’. The operative word here is choose. It’s a matter of decision, and you want to explain the decision, not some objective truth that no one can argue with.
When you wear the ‘why this over that’ lens, it shapes how you think and how you decide from the get-go. It’s not just limited to an after-the-fact justification.
- Make Sure You Have Good Answers
Understanding what you need to ask yourself is a great first step, but since you changed how you operate in step one, the following steps also need to change. Answering ‘why this over that’ requires a different thinking than answering why something could be a good idea.
This kind of thinking is often tricky because you have multiple options, each with its pros and cons, and therefore, the decision or preference of one over the other is a challenging one to make.
It would have been so easy if the answer was clear, but this is rarely the case. Answering ‘why this over that’ requires analysis and trade-off consideration, which in turn might make some of your decisions easier, but still rarely a clear cut.
Remember, easy decisions are for AI to make. The rest is on you.
Making sure you always have good answers is a high bar to set. It requires commitment since it is not going to be easy. The thinking process itself is not trivial, and a major part of the process is the feedback you get.
I once had a PM who came to me complaining about the engineering team challenging his leadership. He said that they constantly ask him why should they do what he wanted them to do. To me, this means great partnership. I asked the PM why he was reluctant to answer them. If he had good answers, he should have been happy to share them. As I mentioned above, I expect all engineers to understand why we do something before they get going. The problem starts if the PM doesn’t have good answers, which explains why he felt uncomfortable in the situation.
If you get caught without good answers, take a step back and go do your homework. It’s first and foremost on you.
- Communicate the ‘Why’
Once you have good answers, don’t keep them to yourself.
The team needs this context not only to trust and follow you but also to understand and remember what you say.
I see many product leaders who don’t want to waste everyone’s time with background, so they cut to the chase and just say what needs to be done. That never works. It alienates the engineering team and discourages them from participating in the discussion or asking questions. With other stakeholders like marketing and sales, it might give them answers to very specific questions they have about the ETA for a certain feature, but it doesn’t do anything more than that. They wouldn’t remember the list anyway and can’t even appreciate if it’s a good one or not.
I encourage you to try it out: explain your considerations, demonstrate the line of thought that led you to take a certain decision, and dwell on the complexity. Being transparent about how you think might lead to people challenging you, but you should look at it as help. They help you create a tighter and more robust strategy, roadmap, product, or plan.
Check the level of engagement in such a discussion. I expect it to be much higher than your usual “Here is what we are going to do” presentation. Check how much people remember – you’ll see a similar uplift.
It is no coincidence that storytelling has been such a buzz in recent years. People have always communicated by telling stories, and in a world packed with so much information at any given moment, you must talk to people in their native language if you want their attention – both in real-time and over time.Sharing just the bottom line is stingy. Be generous with your listeners, and you’ll get a ton back.
