This article comes from Julie Grondin's insightful talk at the Product Marketing Summit in Toronto, check out her full presentation here.
After 25 years of working in startups, tech titans, and everything in between, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that every company is at least a little bit dysfunctional.
Whether it's mild, moderate, or severe, dysfunction exists in every single organization.
From what I've seen, this dysfunction typically stems from how a company gathers and shares information, which has a huge impact on how it makes decisions.
So, in this article, I’m going to share how you can fix the information flow in your organization and eliminate the dysfunction that makes everyone’s jobs – especially yours – harder.
The three types of organizational dysfunction
Let's start by exploring the types of dysfunction that most organizations are facing.
Information dysfunction
First up, there’s information dysfunction. This happens when companies don’t prioritize sourcing information (like competitive intelligence and market research), documenting that information, and recording all the components that support product strategy.
Or, perhaps all that information is being gathered and rigorously documented, but it’s not being shared with the people who need it. This is a massive problem in many organizations.
Decision-making dysfunction
Next, there's decision-making dysfunction. This occurs when leaders in the organization have a hard time making decisions. You end up in situations where no decisions are made, bad decisions are made, or uninformed decisions that change every week are taking place.
These dysfunctions are self-perpetuating because organizations that don’t prioritize gathering the right information don't have the data they need to make informed decisions.
Punting the dysfunction
Now, you can operate with information and decision-making dysfunction for a while – some companies even manage to be quite successful despite not having the data they need to make good decisions.
However, while things look good on the surface, teams are often just punting the dysfunction around in the background. Let me explain what I mean.
Let’s imagine that no market research has been done in your organization. In the absence of data, engineering and product management teams may go back and forth for a while before coming up with some code and a user interface that they believe is right. They then pass it on to the sales team in the form of a release and wash their hands of it.
The sales team is left wondering what to do with this release, so they drag marketing in. Together, they struggle to figure out what customers need to know about this new product or feature. After some back and forth, they decide they understand its value, and then they release it to the market.
