Why & How to Speak Up
How to help save your organization from making bad decision
Do you speak up at your workplace, if you encounter a product/tech spec that:
Is solving a problem that is not aligned with company goals and objectives?
Isn’t the right solution?
Seems like some leader's personal project?
Is a solution in search of a problem?
What if the product/tech spec is from a colleague outside of your business vertical? If the answer to any of the above questions is no, you are not alone.
Most people in big companies refrain from speaking up because:
They are new to the company and lack the context to speak against anything.
They are too junior in the position to question their senior colleagues.
Mid-tenure folks assume someone else will say if it's important enough.
Senior colleagues fear asking stupid questions.
They will make enemies and ruin their image.
They fear heresy.
And when people don't speak up, the colleagues can incorrectly assume alignment in favor of the spec. But that's far from the truth.
If such products get built, they are destined to fail. If you are interested in details on how such products fail, check out the Twitter thread "Destined to Fail" from @shreyas. He does an exceptional job at explaining it and it would be redundant for me to repeat it here. So check that out.
But the question remains,
Why Speak Up?
There are many reasons why we should speak up. Reasons such as
We owe it to ourselves as engineers to build the right thing.
It’s a waste of teams time and resources,
We could be building something that matters or has a higher impact
Not building something useless is automatically reduction in product/tech debt
Whatever the reason may be, all of them have the same impact:
Not speaking up is terrible for the business and its stakeholders.
If you are a full-time employee who receives equity (RSU, ISO, NSO, ESPP, etc.), you are a stakeholder in that business. A wrong business decision leads to a waste of resources and time is bad for business.
If you talk to people in big tech organizations, they would argue that the impact of one such wrong decision will be negligible on the business. So why speak up.
They also overlook that similar bad decisions are taking place across other business verticals. And collectively, they are bad news for business and its stakeholders.
But if you dig deeper and ask the same people, given complete anonymity, would you speak up against such specs, the answer changes to yes.
The problem is that there is no complete anonymity in the real world. So how can we encourage people to speak up? Here's how:
How to Speak Up
Before I share the trick, a fair warning, this framework is simple to understand and hard to execute. But the good news is that it applies to all types of conversations both inside and outside the workplace.
The trick is to use The Radical Candor Framework, i.e., Care Personally & Challenge Directly (Youtube video of framework creator Kim Scott explaining it)
In addition to the video, I recommend getting the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott and giving it a read. And as I said, it applies to every communication both inside and outside of work.
Learning the art of speaking up is a 10x skill. It will significantly benefit both you and your organization.
But if you are still unconvinced that speaking up is the right thing to do, let me share one more analogy.
Analogy:
Imagine you are on a big boat traveling through the vast seas. While at sea, you realize that someone is planning to have a raging bonfire on deck, another person is leaving the kitchen door and windows open at night; another person is removing the deck railings, etc.
Do you speak up? I hope you do because none of these decisions are good for the boat and the people on board.
The same is true for organizations, whether they are startups or big tech. Yes, a single bad decision will not sink the boat or kill the people on board, but enough of them will cause a disaster.
Speaking up will help both the business and its stakeholders.
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