Earlier this year, I wrestled with a difficult strategy decision. I spoke with colleagues about it, but they hadn't faced quite anything like what I was trying to work through. While they were great at providing a sounding board for me, I felt very lonely with my problem.
I brought my problem to one of my mentors, Tom, and he empathized with me and shared one of his own tough product decisions. And that's when it hit me, that the reason that my problem was so isolating was because we, as an organization, hadn't done a good job at sharing the process behind our strategic decisions. We'd done a great job at highlighting wins, and even sometimes doing retros for bad situations, but there was never any talk on how to make those decisions in the first place.
It's a problem that comes up in every organization. Leaders gloss over the hard work that goes into their success ("there were some long nights") without going into detail on how they came up with the brilliant solution that helped grow the company. There's little benefit in giving a presentation on the work immediately after it's done before any results are in ("what if they second guess me?") and after the results are in, the decisions that led to it are a distant memory ("who really cares anymore?").
This all leads to a lack of institutional knowledge, poor decision making, and contributes to a lack of psychological safety at work.
Enter the journalist.
My mentor's story was about how he had built HubSpot's email sending infrastructure -- at a time when it wasn't clear that we should build our own or continue to partner with another company to send our email traffic. His decision to build our own enabled us to scale in a way we could not have imagined before. It was fascinating to hear how he weighed his options, what data he considered, and then how he advocated for it to company leadership. I interviewed Tom as he told me his story, transcribed it, and put it on the internal wiki.
I did the same with PMs who led some of the trickiest decisions we'd made in the past few years: Why did HubSpot create a Free tier? Why did we partner on our video project, but buy motion.ai for our chatbot solution? How did we decide to repackage our Ads add-on? It wasn't just product, one of my friends in the marketing department interviewed one of her colleagues about Marketing decisions he'd made.
The results were pretty magical. The interviews consistently ranked highly on our internal wiki with hundreds of employees reading them. PMs discussed them among themselves and learned who to go to for help with a build/buy/partner, pricing, packaging or other major decision. Importantly, it was also a way to celebrate some of the wins that junior PMs had that otherwise would have gone unnoticed.
As leaders, we think of appreciating employees by giving them awards (monetary and/or recognition) for their contributions. By becoming journalists, we can give the gift of recognition to important team members and at the same time formalize institutional knowledge and help everyone in the organization level up. Try it out!
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