Refactoring Orgs

The standard "official" response to the internal mocking of a shiny new product has always been to call the feedback valuable and signal that improvements were coming. I've always thought that framing deserved scrutiny. It positions critical people as participants in a feedback loop rather than as sources of product truth.

There is a specific type of organizational response that converts expert dissent into a change management problem. The logic runs: of course there is resistance, change is hard, we will support people through the transition. This framing is effective at neutralizing criticism without requiring product leadership to take it seriously. And it is exactly wrong when the people being dismissed are domain experts or very experienced senior sales or marketing people very close to the product.

In this framing, leadership comes up with all kinds of excuses to ignore their feedback: They're not even on the same team, they don't have enough insights, they didn't understand the strategy, they have no clue about the market, they're entrenched in "the old ways of doing things", they are too stupid, they're just envious, they resist anything new.

The truth is: Your experts aren't resisting your shiny new product because they dislike change. They are just describing, with precision, what happens when they use your product. Go and interview them, instead of ignoring their feedback. If a customer reported this about a product, it would go into the bug tracker, not the change management plan. But in the early phases of shipping a shiny new product, you don't have any meaningfully engaged customers, yet. Especially at this point, dismissing the most valuable expert feedback available is plain stupid, fullstop.

The gap between what leadership claims and what your own experts experience is never a communication problem. It is a signal that the product does not perform as advertised, reported by the most credible source available. Treating it as anything else is a deliberate choice to not hear it.