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Creating an Environment for Creativity

To best foster your team’s creativity, focus less on the solution and keep talking about the problem.

You know the feeling of a new idea. It’s exciting to think about, to wrap your head around, and to whiteboard ideas for.

We all want to be part of a team just like that: high-functioning, high-output, and creative. Product leaders play an important part in the psychology of a team. And as a product leader, we are incentivized to be concerned not only with what we’re building but how we’re building it.

Our roadmaps, our backlogs, and our discussions are usually focused on the solutions: build this API, extend the UI this way, create this landing page, add this button, etc.

We like talk about solutions because talking about solutions is fun. It’s exciting to be part of a conversation that ends in a bunch of fun projects with fun codenames.

But think back to the last time a project or initiative went wrong. That retro is almost always full of the same themes: unclear expectations, ever-changing priorities, or the super-helpful “communication issues”.

What happened with all that excitement from the beginning of the project? This time was supposed to be different! Here’s exactly when it happens:

At some point, we stop talking about the problem and only focus on executing the solution.

The same solution that we designed, estimated and planned weeks (or months!) ago has been in motion for a while. At some point, we start nitpicking UI or over-thinking micro-optimizations.

We lost focus of the original problem and started polishing. That’s when the problem solving ends, when the creativity slows way down, and where the fun ends.

A team does their best work when they’re in a creative environment. To bring the creativity back to software development, bring the problems back into focus:

  • Your roadmap should be a list of problems to focus on, not solutions.  Your roadmap should reflect a list of the problems your team is going to try to solve. Keep talking about the problems and their relative priority, and be able to clearly communicate why they’re ranked the way they are.
  • Repeat the problem more than the solutionTo get the most out of your team, make sure that the problem is well understood by the team. Be sure the whole team can communicate what the problem is, why it’s important to address, and why it’s important to address now. I find it useful to kick off grooming and planning meetings by re-stating the problem and our current progress. Then let your creatives discuss how it gets solved.
  • Be stubborn about the problem you’re addressing, but be flexible about the solution. There’s a reason the problem is prioritized on your roadmap, so changing the problem you’re attacking should be painful. However, discussing and embracing new solutions is part of a healthy creative process. Challenge the team to explain why “this new solution” is the best way to address the problem, especially when taking time constraints into consideration.
  • Agree on how to measure the solution before you start building it. The objective judge of a solution is the impact it has on the problem. Figuring out how to measure the solution is sometimes as hard as figuring out how to solve the problem in the first place. Before you write a single line of production code, discuss the metrics you’ll use to define success, what tools you’ll use to monitor those metrics, and any work the team will need to do to facilitate accurate reporting. (I like Mixpanel)
  • Your problem should have a clear “re-assesment date”, not a “target ship date”. The team can’t read the future, so you realistically don’t know if the current solution is going to solve your problem. For every problem on your roadmap, you should be able to communicate how long you’re willing to invest in solving it. Whether this is purely for planning an coordination (for example, a user conference in November) or for financial resourcing, make sure there’s a date in which you will re-evaluate the problem’s priority if it hasn’t been solved.

Increase the time your team spends talking about the problems you’re trying to solve, and you’ll start seeing more creative solutions immediately.

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