Organizational awareness: 9 tips for product teams

A lack of organizational awareness often becomes apparent when you have poor communications and weak team alignment.

For example, have you ever been part of a product team that spent a great deal of effort building a product, only to see it seriously underperform during launch? Besides skimping on user research or not running product tests, it could be that your team didn’t properly communicate with stakeholders, or didn't align your objectives with other teams'.

Keep reading for some tips to avoid misalignment in the future and to improve your product team's organizational awareness.

What organizational awareness is and how it can help your product team

Organizational awareness for product teams is the practice of 'reading the room' in your organization to understand informal hierarchies, communication channels, and inter-team and cross-functional team dynamics.

Kate Leto, product management coach and consultant, describes organizational awareness as the “ability to sense the unwritten tone, tide, and climate of an organization.” This emotional intelligence capacity helps you understand the informal communication channels and hierarchies in your organization. When you know they exist and know how they work, you can remove obstacles and enlist help from others outside your team to get things done.

Every organization has an official hierarchy described by its organization chart, but the org chart doesn’t tell the whole story when it comes to understanding team dynamics or whether teams work cross-functionally.

Organizational awareness can help you connect with your team—and other teams across the company—on a deeper level, opening up opportunities to:

• Make the right decisions for your product

• Communicate in a way that resonates

• Collaborate across the organization

• Build shared understanding

Here's how:

How organizational awareness helps you make the right decisions for your product

You spend a lot of time as a product manager making decisions to ensure your product’s success—but you may not be in a position to make every decision.

Here's how organizational awareness can help you and your product team make the best decisions for your product and customers:

Tip 1: identify the decision-makers

In most high-functioning product teams, decisions aren’t always made by the same person. Team members who understand technology make feasibility decisions, and people with design experience make usability decisions, while product people typically make value and viability decisions.

To make the right choices for your product, identify the right decision-maker. You can gain some high-level insight into who that might be from an org chart, but you need to understand some of the informal networks and team connections to know who's best positioned to make key decisions for specific situations.

We talked to Kent McDonald, a product manager with experience working in a variety of organizations, to get his perspective on selecting the right decision-maker. According to Kent, you need to determine key decision-makers early on so you can pick the right person based on their knowledge and experience—not based on how you think they’ll decide:

“Whenever possible, you should determine the decision-makers for different types of decisions when you start a new effort. If you wait until you reach a decision point, you’ll find that choosing a decision-maker will be much more difficult.”

Tip 2: understand what information is needed to make a decision

Organizational awareness is a huge asset when it comes to making timely and informed decisions.

When you understand your organization, you know who you need to talk to to get all the necessary information. You also know exactly who you need to share specific information with to ensure the best decision is made for your product.

For example, if your product has a few workflows tripping up your users, you need some additional information to know which customer pain point to tackle first. You and your research team can help each other out—the product experience insights you get through using various user research techniques and PX tools (like Hotjar!) provide the information you need to make an informed decision about next steps.

Tip 3: build support for the decision

Okay, you've made a decision. Good! But your job as a product manager has just begun:

Now you need to get buy-in and build support—which may be the aspect of decision-making where organizational awareness plays the biggest part.

You’re inevitably going to make decisions that aren’t agreeable to everyone. To make sure your tough decisions result in the proper action, use your organizational awareness to build support for your choices:

• Talk to people outside your team who could be impacted by your decision and make sure they know why you made the choice you did.

• Ask your team members to do the same with people they have strong relationships with.

• If someone higher up in your organization has an issue with a decision, schedule some one-on-one time with them to listen to their concerns—and be ready to back up your decision with quantitative and qualitative research to ensure them that the decision you made has the customer at heart.

How organizational awareness helps you communicate in a way that resonates

Product managers are often viewed as leaders in their organization, but that leadership position often comes from influence rather than authority.

One of the best ways to get things done for your product is through strong, influential communication skills—and you need organizational awareness when you’re communicating with people outside your team to understand the best way to communicate with them.

Tip 4: adjust to stakeholders' communication preferences

Actively seek to understand how the people you work with prefer to communicate and adjust your communication style with each person or team to match those preferences.

Kent McDonald makes it a point to explicitly ask, “what’s the best way to keep you informed?" when he starts working with new stakeholders:

“I’ve worked for and with enough people by now to know that not everyone absorbs information in the same way or at the same frequency. Learning that fact was a bit painful at times. Some people prefer frequent, short updates via Slack. Others prefer more formal updates on a weekly or biweekly basis. Still, others have told me ‘I don’t read. Just come tell me when you have an update.’ Sometimes all of those people exist for the same product.

“I’ve become a communication chameleon, constantly adjusting my communication style for each different stakeholder. There are times I wish people would adjust to my style just once, but I’m not sure what that is anymore.”

Tip 7: build support for your product

In addition to the stakeholder buy-in you need at the decision-making stage, you also need to build support and get buy-in for the product itself—and a shared understanding of its purpose and the value it offers your customers.

To build support for your product, speak directly to the people whose support you need. When you talk to them, share the insights you’ve gathered from PX tools like Hotjar Surveys, Session Recordings, and Incoming Feedback.

Listen to stakeholders' concerns and consider your product from their perspective. When they see you making an effort to understand things from their point of view, you’ll build stronger relationships with them and experience more support as a result.

How organizational awareness helps you build shared understanding

If you have any hope of creating customer delight with your product, you need to build shared understanding among the product team: you all need to have the same picture of the outcome you’re delivering and how you'll deliver it.

Here’s how organizational awareness can help you build that shared understanding:

Tip 8: listen to understand

To effectively build shared understanding, you need to know where everyone is starting from—don't try to force your view of the situation on everyone. Help your teams reach a shared understanding of your product's objectives and value by listening to understand others' perspectives.

One product manager, who preferred to stay anonymous, suggested that to build shared understanding, organizational awareness will help you with your interactions:

“I ask a lot of questions and have to be patient with responses. I listen and watch for verbal and nonverbal cues, allow lots of space for responses, and follow up when I need clarity. I also have to continually remind myself not to fill in blanks or assume. It's about pulling the information out of others and then documenting, finding trends, and analyzing.”

Tip 9: help team members express the goal in their terms

To build shared understanding, it’s helpful to start from where your team members are—and formulate a new, shared understanding as a group.

Use techniques like the problem statement to give your team members a chance to describe the outcome in their own words:

Then facilitate a discussion with your team where you start with each person’s perspective and reach a single, shared outcome.

This shared understanding helps you build the necessary coalition to make things happen. Everyone involved understands the outcome you’re striving for and their role in getting there.