Agency vs Ambition 

I want to believe that all product people are both ambitious and have high agency. But recently I’ve come to realize that this is not always the case.  

It pains me to admit that, and my first instinct was that these are not people that I can help.  But I’m not quite ready to give up on these people.

Ambition refers to wanting to be the best you can possibly be, for yourself, your product team, and your company.

Agency refers to taking the initiative and the actions to impact your job, your team and your company.

The pre-requisite for strong product people is high agency, but the pre-requisite for agency is ambition.  Even if you have the skills, if you don’t have ambition, you probably aren’t motivated to use those skills.

I understand lack of agency, especially from those people that have lived under command and control systems their entire careers, but honestly I struggle to understand a lack of ambition.  

Ambition is at the core of entrepreneurship, and most product people are at least in part driven by the desire to bring something new and worthwhile into the world.

The reason for this article is that recently, some people have highlighted the fact that even at the top product model companies in the world, not all the product teams are strong, empowered product teams, and even those people that think they are doing pretty well believe that they can and should do better.

Because of this, they argue that it’s essentially hopeless, and there’s little value in looking at strong product companies, or learning from their lessons.

The fact that even at the best companies, not all teams are strong has always been true, and it’s also something we have pointed out from the beginning.  It’s in our books, and in many of our articles, including one of our most popular discussing the differences between feature teams and empowered product teams:

“I can tell you that with few exceptions, the best product teams at the best companies are all about the empowered product team model.  However, I will admit that even in what I consider the best product companies, not every product team is empowered.  In truth, some are feature teams.  Usually that’s because the leadership does not yet trust that particular team.  Sometimes that trust needs to first be earned.  And sometimes the issue is with the leader wanting to dictate solutions.“

Nobody has ever told me they were surprised by this statement.

Is there anyone out there that really believes that there is such a thing as a perfect company?  

But the question was never whether a company was perfect.  The relevant question is what is the predominant model at a company, and is that model generating the necessary outcomes?

Just as we often find a few pockets of empowered product teams at predominantly feature team companies, we find the reverse as well.  We coach people doing an organization assessment to expect this, and to identify the company’s predominant model.

But to imply that just because not all of the product teams at a company are strong means that they’re no better than the majority of companies out there, is to dramatically obscure the real difference between strong product companies and their weaker competitors.

But this logic leads to an even more disturbing question, which is why should anyone pay attention to how the top performing companies actually work?

After all, they argue, they are in a different country, or in a different market, or have different customers, or have different company cultures, or operate under different regulations and constraints, or have different leaders, or any of countless other perceived reasons to believe that their learnings would not apply to them.

Maybe we should just embrace who we are, and stop comparing ourselves to others?

This logic is what I struggle to understand.

I can’t imagine ever being in a state of mind where I stop trying to improve.  To stop learning new things.  To stop growing.  This literally sounds like death to me.

And in every single human endeavor I can think of – sports, medicine, art, music, engineering, literature, physics – we look to the best in our respective field for inspiration.  We have entire institutions such as the Olympics, the World Cup, and the Nobel Prize to help us identify these people.

Now it’s perfectly fine to argue about what defines “the best” – whether that’s the best in sports, the best in medicine, or the best performing product companies.  I have that debate all the time, and my views on what constitutes “the best” in product have evolved significantly over the years.

But I have never before had to argue about why it’s good to study the best and leverage whatever learnings we can.

What I believe is really going on, even though I hate to admit this may be the case for some in the product community, is that they do not desire to improve themselves.  Some people lack ambition.

For these people, comparisons with the best are uncomfortable, and they gravitate towards anyone that tells them that they are just fine the way they are, and that being better is overrated anyway.

Until recently, many of these same people complained that it wasn’t possible for a company outside of Silicon Valley to operate this way.  But after seeing many success stories of companies from a range of industries located all over the world, now the focus seems to be on the next reason not to try.

I think it’s worth noting that of all the different types of people and product teams that I work with, those at the best companies are generally the least satisfied with how they work, and are constantly pushing themselves to do better.  I can say that I have never worked at a company where I didn’t think we could and should work better.  And I would say I worked at some very good product companies.  That is not a contradiction.  The desire to continually improve comes from the ambition to always do better.

This is also why we argue there is no single right way to create products.  Instead, there are first principles that help guide us on the path to success.

To end on a positive note, this entire discussion reminds me of an amazing recent commencement speech given by Roger Federer, considered by many to be the greatest tennis player of all time.  Over the course of his career, he won just under 80% of his matches, which is a remarkable accomplishment and outcome.  But if you look at the work involved in winning those matches, he only won 54% of the points he played.  Barely more than half.  Hardly perfect.

There’s no question that the work of product is hard, but there are always opportunities to get better at the craft.  For those with the agency and the ambition to embrace these opportunities, the future is waiting.