People as a source of knowledge at the company
Cross-functional professionals need to talk to different people in different areas. But it is important to understand their motivation (and why some of them prefer keeping information)
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As a former Journalist, one of my favorite aspects of being a Product Manager is talking to different areas to create a mutual understanding of the business. We can call that Discovery if you want, but even when we’re delivering the product with engineers we usually talk to stakeholders in weekly meetings, all-hands, and, also, the engineers who are building the product or fixing bugs.
It's important to note that I’m not referring to thrash talk – which has its importance, too. When you traffic into different areas of the company, you see that people hold and share information in different ways.
Some of them could share reports from that area, while others would talk about customers considering their experience in the role. That’s OK because, as Robert Grant reminds us in an influential paper published in 1996:
“The primary role of the organization is knowledge application rather than knowledge creation”
Gathering data about the company is crucial, even more if it is related to your product. But don’t expect the product or engineering team to keep that information. Often, those teams provide the way to collect data. But the guardians are allocated into specific areas: Marketing team with cost of acquisition, Sales team with total sales, Customer Success with CSAT or NPS…
In those environments, we need to consider those different people as sources of knowledge. The challenge, though, is to collect, align a mutual understanding, and participate in decisions to achieve strategic results.
In this article, I want to focus more on collecting knowledge, considering that the company doesn’t centralize or document everything from those departments.
Knowledge aggregation
It’s important to cite Grant because he researched how to create knowledge inside companies. One of the most remarkable things that he described is the importance of considering individual and organizational levels to share and absorb knowledge.
Let’s say that you were hired to lead the payment product of the company. You probably had previous knowledge of how payment methods work, those challenges and intricacies, but you need to understand, inside the company, how other teams are affected by a possible delay between the gateway and the point of sale (POS). This is the moment when you conduct the discovery, but you also need to listen to people from different areas.
People inside the company could share tangible and intangible knowledge and, as an article by Harvard Business Review (HBR) explains:
“One person might need information from various parties to be able to complete their work effectively”.
During that process, it’s important to contribute with your expertise, which could be materialized into questions.
“Efficiency of knowledge aggregation is greatly enhanced when knowledge can be expressed in terms of a common language”, explains Grant.
And, of course, business is the common language. Not everyone likes to use jargon at work, but we can’t deny that, as a communication tool, it effectively works.
What to do when an employee prefers keeping information
Inevitably, a Product Manager needs to navigate multiple areas effectively, but each company has its way of doing it right.
In some companies, employees rather prefer to keep knowledge with themselves than share it with their colleagues.
According to a study published at HBR, people tend to hide information at work when they feel pressured by their leaders to share. “If they’re afraid of losing a competitive advantage, they may be even more reluctant to reveal information”, the researchers concluded. On the other hand, professionals with more autonomy, accountable for more complex work, are more likely to share their information.
Probably we can see a correlation of ‘knowledge revealers’ working at startups, where people usually have more dynamic roles in their job description and understand the value of sharing knowledge.
You can also see that dynamic behavior in big companies either, but you will probably face resistance asking analysts or junior roles if they could share knowledge from this department. It isn’t just because of the bureaucracy: some of them see information as an important transaction to grow in their roles.
Considering that, I don’t recommend asking their managers to force their direct reports to share their knowledge.
In those cases, you need to use your social skills. You can begin with thrash talk at the elevator, speak with those stakeholders during a coffee, or even ask them for lunch.
In Brazil, informal communication has more value than formal communication at work, so talking, sharing a little bit of your knowledge, and creating empathy could bring you positive results. But make sure that this communication effort will be valuable, because time is scarce, and you need to learn more about the company considering different perspectives, from different departments.