If unknowingly reliving behaviors from our childhood brings us positive feelings of familiarity and nostalgia, and some may say reminders of childhood warmth, maybe in twisted way some of us can’t get enough of some repetitive frustrations, as these send us back to our childhood experiences?

Frustrations at work can be our fault or our organization’s fault. In both cases these feelings of frustration, and our reactions and actions because of them, might be unknowingly a behavioral pattern we learned as a child and are still part of us, even though we are older and wiser - hopefully ;). While in our childhood these patterns helped us understand the world of adults, in later age these patterns can keep us feeling as kids who can’t control their world and don't understand it.

The dynamics of authority, permissions, wrong vs right, what should we do and how was it perceived by people more “powerful” than us, unwittingly sends us to our childhood when we looked for our parents’ approval, and in some aspects it was connected to the love we got from them and the love we didn’t get. As kids, many times our parents’ logic is hidden from us, and sometimes can also feels arbitrary and unfair, this can become part of what we expects from the world and unknowingly look for. (Note: this is changing these days thanks to recent parenthood approaches where parents are transparent about their logic with their kids, and also more aware for their own motives using tools like psychotherapy and others)

The complex dynamic described above is relived in our work where usually other people in the hierarchy might prevent us from doing what we want or what we think is right, keep us in a cycle of feeling the world is not fair, or that we don’t understand or agree with the logic of their actions. Reliving this dynamics keeps us frustrated and unhappy, but also in a familiar and understandable world. Making these frustrations “good” and comfortable ones.

Symptoms (Some or all):

• Being regularly frustrated at work
• Happily sharing and spreading “problematic” stories about the workplace/ boss/team/company
• Being sarcastic to people trying to change the workplace for the better
• Random rage and negative feelings
• Usage of phrases like: “I knew this will happen”, “it is always like that”, etc
• Easily frustrated or becoming angry at home or with friends

Prescription:

Awareness to the frustrations and their origins is important to our well being, and facing them can bring positive change in other aspects of our life. Understanding the hidden benefits of these frustrations can help us be better employes, improve our work environment, and god forbid, bring more happiness to our work and more importantly to our life.

Our work takes most of our day time, and our awake time in general. Frustrations during these hours can affect the rest of our day, and more importantly symbolize other frustrations in life that are more difficult to identify. Facing the negative feelings we encounter at work can eventually help us identify patterns in other aspects of life, and by working on these in more actionable environment we can bring joy and inner peace to our life after work, and to the quality time we share with the people we love.

Remedy Patterns:

• Help your organization and team to move to data driven and hypothesis based prioritizations and management, thus making your environment less arbitrary and more logical and transparent to others and yourself.
• Encourage openness for feedback and objective criticism using: retrospects, postmortem, 360 reviews and 1:1s.
• Write down frustrations to better understand their source and your point of view on them. Consider using the 5-whys approach to better understand the origin of the frustrations.
• Share negative feedback with relevant people, and work with them on making from it constructive feedback. This will help create positive cycle to these frustrations, and reduce the effect they will have on other aspects of your life.

Note 1: Some managers and organizations are not open for changes and feedback, or encourage efforts for facing problems in their organization. A potential risk could be constant struggle to change the organization, what will create a new “good” frustration. Individuals should be careful from that loop, and eventually prefer working in an environment where they don’t have to relieve these frustrations, for their own sake and for the sake of their loved ones.

Note 2: Frustrations that are our fault, might be failure to communicate our emotions or fault feeling that our needs are less important. This situation will require self work (preferably with someone with you to get an objective feedback on your point of view). For people who feel that, I would also recommend reading: the Drama of the Gifted child.

The “familiar” frustration was originally published in Product Organizations Psychology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fear of change can be more easily identified in ourselves as resistance for changes. Many different researches on the brain shows that our brain connect change with lose: lose of what we know, lose of the feeling of being knowledgeable and the feeling that we know what we do, and of course the pains of learning something new. All these reasons can become unknowingly excuses for keep doing what we normally do, even if there are better alternatives, such as faster and more scalable solutions, or new ways of work, that even with the cost of learning can save effort and time in the medium and long term, and sometimes even in the long run.

In a dynamic and fast world that changes often and adopts new technologies easily, in a global environment with other people who work on similar problems and constantly develop tools, frameworks and products that we can use facing these fear can become a superpower. Super power that will help teams & individuals to work faster and focus on their unique value.

Despite learning pains and other costs describe above, adapting to changes proven to be important to our brain, and researches in last years about brain plasticity (1, 2, 3, 4) shows how learning something new and adapting to changes create new connections in our brain, and these connections improve our quality of living and brain functionality.

Symptoms (Some or all):

• Strong preference of something we know over something new.
• Working with old versions of frameworks and tools
• Using tools and process because of familiarity and not good reasoning.
• Usage of phrases like: “I’ve used that in my previous company”, “This how I always work”, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.

Prescription:

Confronting this fear of change is crucial, as it is a major blocker for progress without real reason except fear itself. Exploring new technologies, product and practices in a regular manner using events like hackathons, conferences, meetups, and more, is a safe way to create a culture that is aware of new trends and solutions and more importantly not afraid of them.

Remedy Patterns:

• Regularly expose yourself and the team for new methods, trends & technologies using tools like — technology radar
• Create team diversity to increase chance for diverse thinking in the team.
• Create technology diversity using full stack culture, encouraging team members to learn different technologies and method of work.
• Compare tools and practices based criterias and accept new options that meet them
• Use hackathons as regularly practice starting from blank page.
• Visit meetups and conferences to be exposed to new market trends and technology changes. These conferences should end will a presentation for the team to keep everyone informed and in that spirit.
• Create physical working environment that encourage being dynamic, for example: Laptops and shared spaces (reduce attachment for specific seat), switching between teams (remove attachment for a specific team and encourage shift of knowledge from one team to another), and more.

Important Note:

Some may overuse the prescriptions above to encourage too many changes. These can create a false feeling or progress, or enable team to feel creative in an environment that don’t supply real purpose oriented ownership and/or creativity. This is a different topic for a different time.

Fear of change was originally published in Product Organizations Psychology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The wish for power at work can be viewed in the decision making process of company, managers or contributors. How much emphasis they put into their point of view being accepted vs putting emphasis on the question in hand and making the right decision. This can be found in small decisions like small design questions or in minor product flows, and in bigger decisions like what technology to use or what features to develop and support.

This struggle for power is common in environments that lacks in providing autonomy for individuals, or ones that have hierarchies where title, rank and seniority have significant importance when making decisions. Many of the times these organizations members don’t know any other way of work, and will adapt easily to ego struggle culture, but most of them will also learn to fit into balanced and healthy environment when giving the opportunity.

Symptoms (Some or all):

• Use of power: loud voice, fist gesture and other power symbols in body language, over talking others during meetings, and more.
• Usage of phrases like: my way or the highway, this is my feature / responsibility / team / company
• Micromanagement in order to feel involved in the details.
• Search for title
• Hiring and promoting of yes-man (and yes-woman ;) )
• Requiring being last approval step, creating an organization bottleneck.
• Changes of organization architecture and decision making process to make sure they are required.

Prescription:

Accepting this wish in ourselves is a good place to start: require ourselves to focus on the unbiased objectives and goals, lead discussions and processes with questions, be open to other alternatives and compare these alternatives using matrices (or other tool you prefer), while supplying clear criterias of consideration.

For manager the challenge is not to use their “so called” power, and give clear objective goals and not specific implementations, in technology aspects and in product aspects. The ongoing process will be translating company needs and goals into numbers, product values and business impact and allowing team members to come up with a solution that meet these requirements and not management specific implementation. While it is challenging, the psychological benefits for the team members and manager can even affect their life after work, also known as life it self…

In an organizational level, using objective criterias can shift culture from power oriented to knowledge oriented, when people will feel their views are considered and appreciate, and when they are acknowledged as smart mature individuals who can make smart decisions using company culture and processes as guidelines.

Remedy Patterns:

• Focus on the why and not the how — “Fall in love with the problem not the solution”
• Encourage autonomy of thinking by creating a work process around challenges and business hypothesis and not specific predefined solutions.
• Practice being open for feedback and other opinions using questions before statements.
• Set objective KPIs to your team to measure your success and the team success.
• Set example and encourage visibility in decision making.
• Document decision making process using tools that enables criterias comparisons.
• Enable everyone in the team that understand the problem or working on it to participate in suggestions process, to eliminate rank over brain.
• Accept all suggestions that meet the criterias of the challenge in hand.
• Supply positive feedback on impact and tests for hypothesis, over measureless solutions.
• Supply professional growth path instead of hierarchy of power and titles.

Wish for power was originally published in Product Organizations Psychology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Managers and leaders, are often placed in charge of a scope where success is more complex to measure, and are in charge of team members that see themselves as growing to replace them. These managers unknowingly face their fear of being replaced, the fear that one of the their team members will become better than them and will replace them when they fail, or following a random decision made by a higher level manager. This fear might have a slight chance of becoming the reality, but in a healthy and growing company 99% of the times hiring managers and leaders will benefit from hiring team members that their skills threatens them, making this fear just an old evolutionary survival fear.

While many different organizations try to face this issue by building complex hierarchies and a ladder that managers can slowly climb, this can easily affect the manager’s daily work, their way of thought and how they work with their team members.

Symptoms (Some or all):

• Micromanagement in order to feel involved in the details.
• Hiring only junior team members.
• Requiring themselves to be the last approval step, creating an organization bottleneck.
• Avoiding facing the personal growth plans of their team members
• Avoiding days off to feel crucial to the organization.

Prescription:

Like many other personal issues, managers should be aware of this fear in them and face it. This is a normal feeling, especially for new managers. While the answer for this fear is that a manager succeeds when their team works perfectly without them, and that there are many different ways to measure managerial success (business KPIs, efficiency and quality, members satisfaction, etc), the simple truth is that fear itself doesn’t help us be better managers, but the opposite.

Being aware of the fear will allow managers to get better by avoiding the symptoms above, and send them on the journey to find how to measure their success, and eventually make them better managers.

Remedy Patterns:

• Hire people who are better than you
• Set objective KPIs to your team to measure yours and the team’s success
• Shift to be a reviewer and feedback giver roles and not a process blocker
• List all your current responsibilities and help your team members grow into doing them
• Make sure your team works perfectly and use the same process when you take time off.

Fear of being replaced was originally published in Product Organizations Psychology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Many teams take pride in building and implementing things that other teams created full blown products or solutions that would solve their needs, and using those can save them many hours and maintenance energy. Different team members unknowingly find satisfaction in building something on their own, while ignoring the cost of returning later to this feature or framework for bugs and additional changes, at the cost of losing focus. Some product leaders might insist on a specific feature that prevents using significantly faster solutions, just for the sake of feeling proud of their uniqueness, or for avoiding the acceptable pressure of focusing on finding the real business uniqueness.

Symptoms (Some or all):

• Declaring “My problems are unique”.
• Reinventing the wheel, and implementing existing tools and solutions.
• Not using solutions that are “good enough” because of missing features.
• Making mistakes that could be avoided by learning from best practices.

Prescription:

The remedy for this problem is composed of regularly practicing our similarities with others and learning from them, while supplying reassurance and focus to our uniqueness. Product teams should focus on what makes them unique and enjoy the benefits of using and learning from other teams’ solutions and tools.

The practice involve searching for best practices, open source solutions, available tools and learning from your competitors. Searching for how others solve similar problems and not whether there are similar solutions just like what you came up with. The other part of the remedy is constantly focusing on the business KPIS and users needs, to make your success the criteria — not features and frameworks you built, but how you affected the business success and our users.

Regular practice of this behavior is important, as its challenges are regularly changing and available products and technology needs and solutions constantly evolving. It will also increase business value as it will increase regular focus on company core value for it users, and company and team advantages and uniqueness.

Remedy Patterns:

• Openly discuss clear definitions of the problem and not the solution, and find solutions that are worth your money and time. Use disagreement as a sign of other available approaches.
• Regularly search for best practices.
• Search and adopt open source solutions.
• Encourage open source involvement, to develop the thinking of what others may already developed and what others can use from our code base.
• Compromise for “good enough” solutions for needs that are not company focus or company specialty.
• Define KPIs that create and encourage focus on product and team unique values.

My Problem is Unique was originally published in Product Organizations Psychology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

Dr Conway mentioned it casually and connected how data flows between team members to how data flows through the systems they build, how bottlenecks in the team’s way of work will create similar bottlenecks in the systems they design, and how issues within the team will turn to issues within their code and more.

In the broader picture conway’s law connected team communication with how we work and our products and software looks like. Conway’s law also started a discussion about how shaping the team culture can create better product and better code, and for me it also started the realization of how big the connection between our own psychology and human psychology in general with the way we work and the products that we build.

I’ve encountered conway’s law in my personal journey in the world of tech, startups, software development and management. This journey of overcoming different struggles and failures, growing from being busy and nervous while managing 2 team members, to managing 60 people directly while being able to find time to go over code, was a journey full of facing demons, fears and of shaping my beliefs and core values. I’ve faced these changes while taking therapy sessions that helped me identify the different forces and feelings in me. I was facing the personal challenges of wanting to be a caring manager while achieving progress, of wanting to find room for every team member’s individual needs and path, including myself, while making the business successful, and more. All of these helped me turn these growing pains into personal development, which I feel shaped me greatly. These sessions also helped me take conway’s law down to the individual level:

Any individual that designs a system will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of their own communication skills and psychology

While this might seem trivial, I think such understanding can be taken into a more practical level, with identifying the different individual patterns and how they affect the individual’s work, in hope that working through them can create better products, and more importantly happier individuals.

In the following posts I hope to share some thoughts on how our psychology affects the products we create and the product organizations we build, share some patterns to identify forces in yourself and others, while describing possible practices to change these patterns and create better team communication and better products.

I hope sharing these might find others that share this growing process and these growing pains, give them alternative thoughts and solutions, and also open discussions about these topics so I can learn from them even more.

In the hope that continuous development and continuous growth can be applied to us and not just over products and our code.

Psychology of Product Organizations was originally published in Product Organizations Psychology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.