Words Matter
Observation: words matter, and what words we use can hold us back.
In creating great products, we want to have cross-functional teams working closely together and bring all of their expertise together in sort of a hadron collider for ideas where learning and creation of new and interesting things is commonplace.
Words can be a barrier or an accelerant to reaching that desired state.
There are a number of words that are particularly constraining and commonly appear, because they have a long history in product development. Yet they reinforce old approaches and can constrain how your teams behave or believe they should behave.
By shifting our language slightly, we can give ourselves and our teams more space to perform at the highest level.
Resources
Resources don’t have ideas, feedback, feelings, passions, needs, and reactions. If we use that word to describe people, it’s easy to forget to include those people in collaborative ideating, refinement, and enlist them to the cause.
Resources is not a good label for people. It implies that you are just a number, something to be moved around and consumed, like pork bellies or grains.
Let’s call them people. Even better, by what they do: designers, engineers, testers. Whenever possible let’s call them by their names, as in Sarah, or Jack or Hector.
Doing so is an acknowledgement of their uniqueness. It’s a validation that they are valuable. It’s setting an expectation that everyone should treat them like people.
Requirements
Requirements are, by definition, rigid and non-negotiable. Requirements are not supposed to change, they are not optional, they are _required_.
If one person is giving another a requirement, it is closer to a contract than a conversation. Friends don’t give each other requirements. Companies and consultants give each other requirements.
Let’s instead talk about customer problems and needs, and the relative opportunity we have by meeting them. Let’s talk about how important and urgent those needs are to meet relative to each other: for the customer and business.
Customers
Customers are rarely homogenous in their needs, behaviors and desires. This is why customer segmentation matters: how do you believe the market is segmented, who are you targeting, and what is your positioning for your target segments.
Often the word customer is used as a catch-all.
What customers want is X. We are solving for customer need Y.
By using the word customer, we are signaling that customers are homogenous and uniform - they aren’t.
There are various personas and segments that we are serving and targeting with our efforts. Let’s call them by their persona and segment names instead.
Small enterprises care about X. Administrators need Y.
By doing so we are reinforcing to our teams specifically who we are serving, signaling the complexity of the customer and persona environment, and hopefully spreading our empathy and understanding.
I
When you desire alignment and collaboration, using the word ‘l’ can be a barrier to creating that alignment and encouraging collaboration.
Saying I gives you ownership, which makes sense in some cases: opinions, feelings, beliefs. In other cases saying I shuts down debate, singles you out of the group as a leader on your own, maybe above the rest of your team. I decided. I think.
Can you convert those to we? We decided. We think. If you can, it is far more powerful. Of course, just converting the word to we without authentically aligning and representing the group is not going to get you far. What if your I was We a lot more often. Let’s get to we.
More Space
Let’s give ourselves the elbow room to treat people like people, and customer needs like customer needs by using words that reflect our intentions.
