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Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Design leadership advice I would give my past self: Do a better job understanding the difference between a disagreement and a misalignment.

Design leadership advice I would give my past self: Do a better job understanding the difference between a disagreement and a misalignment.

  • Iksar
    Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
    Design leadership advice I would give my past self: Do a better job understanding the difference between a disagreement and a misalignment.

    • Iksar
      Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
      Disagreements are healthy. They can be a sign of diverse opinions. Disagreements lead to iteration, conversation, & learning. Disagreements don't need to be solved. It's ok to disagree. Make a decision, move on, learn from it. Healthy! Awesome! Great!

      • Iksar
        Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
        Misalignments are less healthy. While they also lead to iteration, it's a different kind. Disagreement iteration usually means refining few concepts to their last and greatest iteration. Misalignment iteration is working with the first iteration of many concepts, over and over.

        • Iksar
          Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
          If you can't agree on why you are making something, the end product will either be a bundle of disconnected ideas or the well-connected ideas of the last person who happened to have a say. Neither are great.

          • Iksar
            Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
            In practice, it's easy to let misalignments go unsolved. When you identify a misalignment, it's often at the same moment you identify a decision that needs to be made. The easiest thing to do in this situation is often to make a choice for the team and move on.

            • Iksar
              Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
              Lots of bad outcomes from just moving on. The people who had their work stepped on don't know why. Team can become less invested in solving things together and more reliant on a decision maker person to parachute in and choose which person's first iteration of a thing to do.

              • Iksar
                Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
                When leaders complain about having to make all the choices for their team, I often find the reason is the self-inflicted result of the above comments.

                • Iksar
                  Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
                  I don't know that there is an surefire way to identify a team that is in passionate disagreement vs a team that is misaligned on goals, they can look a lot closer than you'd think.

                  • Iksar
                    Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
                    Nowadays, when we're starting a new thing I spend so much more time with things like goal-setting, decision-making processes, and just generally why we want to do this new thing at all.

                    • Iksar
                      Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
                      Ironically, this is most important for people averse to spending too much time on process and philosophy vs getting in there and 'doing stuff'. If you want to spend all your time 'doing', then prioritize process and philosophy conversations at the very start.

    • Lees_Pic
      Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
      @IksarHS so whats the best way to tell the difference between a disagreement and a misalignment

      • Iksar
        Posted 3 years, 7 months ago (Source)
        @Lees_Pic arguments around the 'why' should something exist vs 'how' it should exist repeated complete redesigns lack of ideas that have gone through multiple iterations
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