I was mentoring a product owner — let’s call him Alberto. He asked me how to get his manager to support his product ideas. Recently, he had presented an idea to his manager and some other senior colleagues. The manager had told him “nice work”, and yet nothing had happened.

I gave him some general tips on how to get ideas across. Like making sure the problem was clear before presenting the solution. But I realized that the more important thing for Alberto was to get quick, clear feedback, even if it meant his idea needed changing, or had to be dropped.

I asked him what the idea was. He told me, and it was clear in context that the manager would never have gone for it. A neat technical enhancement, but too expensive to do, without enough impact for enough customers. The manager’s compliment, “nice work” was a way of thanking him for his effort, yet not going forward with the idea.

Yet Alberto had taken that phrase as approval of the idea, and he’d felt disappointed when after several weeks, nothing more happened. So that’s why he asked me how to get his manager to support his ideas.

Alberto had packed lots of slides into half an hour, and had been very keen to get a positive outcome. I don’t remember the exact details of his conversation at the end, but it went something like this:

Presenter: “Do you think this would work for us?”

Manager: “You’ve put a lot of work into this. I like it…”

Presenter: “I’m glad you like it!”

What’s wrong with that conversation?

The problem is that it’s really not clear what the manager meant with the vaguely positive phrase “I like it…”. Did they really like it, or are they being polite? If they really liked it, did they like it for their situation, or just as a general nice idea? If they did like it for their situation, did they like and understand it enough that they were willing to back it, with money or effort? Do they like it enough to spend political capital in getting others to back it too? Apparently not.

Maybe sometimes the words “I like it” would be the beginning of some real support. Maybe then the pause at the end would be because the listener was searching for the words to express how much they liked the presenter’s idea.

But how would the presenter know for sure, if they immediately take the feedback as positive? That quick response “I’m glad you like it!” shut off further feedback. The moment to truly find out had gone. That response backed the listener into a corner. Perhaps it wouldn’t be comfortable for them to say “Well, I don’t like it enough to back it”. They’d have to think harder about diplomatic ways to let down the presenter. Maybe they wouldn’t say much at all — they’d wait for the presenter to finish, and go away quietly, maybe leaving the presenter in limbo for a couple of weeks, as actually happened with my mentee Alberto.

Objections are your friend

When you present an idea, you need to ask questions that make it easier for the listener to express their true thoughts, even the negative ones. Questions that open things up¹. And after asking a question, leave plenty of space. Even if you don’t get an immediate response, leave more space. Leave space until the point of being uncomfortable, and maybe even a little further.

Also, you need to practice that classic sales technique — inviting objections².

When you’re trying to get someone to back an idea, you’re essentially selling the idea³. Alberto did realize that. He knew that he couldn’t just mutter the details of the idea and hope that colleagues would support it. He knew that he had to make the idea relevant to them, and appealing.

But he didn’t realize something else about selling. A crucial step, after you’ve presented a product or idea, is to find out what reasons the buyer or listener has for not going for it.

That might sound weird or risky. If you’re trying to get someone to buy something, why would you invite them to come up with reasons not to buy it?

But as any good salesperson knows, you’re not making the buyer create objections, you’re surfacing the ones that are there anyway. Why? Not because you’ve hit your quota and you can’t be bothered with selling any more! But because if you don’t work through those existing objections, you’re unlikely to make the sale at all. (And even if you do push one sale through that way, the buyer is unlikely to trust you enough to come back for more.)

Another great thing about surfacing objections early — if there is a strong, immovable reason why they won’t buy, you find out early, and you save your time (and theirs).

An experienced sales person values their own time very highly. Time wasted on an unfruitful sales conversation means you’re not spending time on the next opportunity. An inexperienced salesperson might understand that intellectually, but their emotions get in the way. They are afraid of rejection, and so they don’t push hard enough to surface objections. They’ll wait until objections come up later (or not objections, but silence and a stalled sales process). Honestly — that delayed rejection is even more hurtful in time, but perhaps it’s like taking a bandage off slowly, rather than ripping it off quickly and getting the pain over with.

Is the time factor so critical for us, as managers / team leads / product owners? Perhaps time is even more critical.

We are influencing the work of others, not just ourselves, and so if we are chasing a faulty idea, we may be wasting their time too. If you actually add the numbers, that gets really expensive. Expensive in direct cost (fully-loaded salaries), and also expensive in opportunity cost — the cost of the better things that you and your team could be doing.

It can get more expensive the further that your faulty idea goes. Let’s say that your boss was OK with an idea, or that you’re going ahead with an idea that doesn’t need the boss’s approval. But in presenting the idea to your colleagues who are going to help you work on it, you also failed to surface their objections.

Perhaps they know about some technical flaw in your idea. Or they remember when something similar was tried and failed. Or they just have thoughts on how to improve the idea.

If you don’t actively seek their input, including objections, then you may not get to know their real thoughts on the idea. It has to be clear to them that you really want their input. You can’t just enthusiastically present the idea, then say “any objections”? You need to build their confidence over time that their feedback is really valued. Otherwise they may not feel safe sharing it.

If your team’s objections lie unheard, they may go ahead, less motivated, and spend valuable time on something that is doomed from the start. Or at least could have been much better.

I know you kind of know this already. But knowing and doing are different. Most managers only really learn this lesson over time, painfully. It takes some repetitions of realizing you’ve missed valuable objections you missed, and resolving to do better. Or maybe just one seriously painful lesson like that would do it for some people.

Some don’t learn at all, unfortunately. If they’ve had the luck to succeed without much listening, they’re unlikely to want to change now. Or even if they’ve messed things up by missing objections, they may not be aware of how things could have gone better.

But you, dear reader? You’re not reading for fun, but to maximise your chance of having useful ideas that make a difference in your organization. So do yourself a favor and leave some more space to find out what your manager, stakeholders, and team really think. It’s going to help you in the end.

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1. Ximena Vengochea makes a great point about open questions in her great book “Listen Like You Mean It”. Often, we think that only the “wh-” questions are the ones that get people talking more. And that yes-no questions shut things down, inviting short, closed answers. She shows that that isn’t necessarily the case, with examples such as “Would you call this feedback a must-have or a nice-to-have?” or “Is it more about wanting a raise or wanting to be recognised?” Those questions, though technically closed questions, actually open things up. ↩︎
2. Some sales books talk about “handling objections”. I don’t like that phrase so much. Sometimes I’ve talked with a pushy salesperson who feels eager to handle my objection — to handle it away as quickly as possible! ↩︎
3. Don’t like the thought of selling ideas — or of “selling” anything? Maybe take a look at Daniel Pink’s book “To Sell is Human”. It shows how any effective communication is a bit like selling. (And it’s an easy read, even a bit pop-sciency, but worth a look nonetheless.) ↩︎