Stop the dysfunction: Three ways to improve information flow

This article is based on Julie Grondin’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in Toronto. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard. 

After 25 years of working in startups, tech titans, and everything in between, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that every company is at least a little bit dysfunctional. 

Whether it's mild, moderate, or severe, dysfunction exists in every single organization. 

From what I've seen, this dysfunction typically stems from how a company gathers and shares information, which has a huge impact on how it makes decisions.

So, in this article, I’m going to share how you can fix the information flow in your organization and eliminate the dysfunction that makes everyone’s jobs – especially yours – harder. 

The three types of organizational dysfunction

Let's start by exploring the types of dysfunction that most organizations are facing. 

Information dysfunction

First up, there’s information dysfunction. This happens when companies don’t prioritize sourcing information (like competitive intelligence and market research), documenting that information, and recording all the components that support product strategy. 

Or, perhaps all that information is being gathered and rigorously documented, but it’s not being shared with the people who need it. This is a massive problem in many organizations.

Decision-making dysfunction

Next, there's decision-making dysfunction. This occurs when leaders in the organization have a hard time making decisions. You end up in situations where no decisions are made, bad decisions are made, or uninformed decisions that change every week are taking place. 

These dysfunctions are self-perpetuating because organizations that don’t prioritize gathering the right information don't have the data they need to make informed decisions.

Punting the dysfunction

Now, you can operate with information and decision-making dysfunction for a while – some companies even manage to be quite successful despite not having the data they need to make good decisions. 

However, while things look good on the surface, teams are often just punting the dysfunction around in the background. Let me explain what I mean.

Let’s imagine that no market research has been done in your organization. In the absence of data, engineering and product management teams may go back and forth for a while before coming up with some code and a user interface that they believe is right. They then pass it on to the sales team in the form of a release and wash their hands of it. 

The sales team is left wondering what to do with this release, so they drag marketing in. Together, they struggle to figure out what customers need to know about this new product or feature. After some back and forth, they decide they understand its value, and then they release it to the market.

This dysfunctional setup can work for a while – you might even achieve some success with it. But eventually, you hit a wall. When that happens, it gets pretty chaotic. 

New, conflicting decisions are made every week, and everybody's so swamped they can't move their projects forward. So, the company goes on a giant hiring spree, but this organizational dysfunction hasn’t gone away, and everyone's still stuck. 

No one knows how to talk about the product. Eventually, customers start to churn because they'll only tolerate dysfunctional products for so long. 

This is typically when the organization realizes it needs to put more emphasis on product marketing. They may even decide to hire more PMMs or bring in a VP of Product Marketing.

Unfortunately, these are huge systemic problems within the organization – there’s a limit to how much middle-management level product marketing can solve them. 

So, what happens when product marketing teams are brought in to solve all this dysfunction? PMMs just end up stuck in the middle of it all. 

As product marketers, we've done a really good job of telling people that we're the axis of collaboration, sitting between product and sales. That’s all well and good until you find yourself in the middle of all the dysfunction, getting buried under all the problems that are being thrown at you. 

I may be biased because I've been doing product marketing for 12 years, but I think product marketing teams are the hardest hit by dysfunction. This is because we're often expected to fix organizational dysfunction before we can do our actual jobs.

If you’re in this situation, just know that this dysfunction probably isn’t your fault; chances are, you were brought into an organization that wasn't ready for product marketing, regardless of what they thought. 

How to stop feeding the dysfunction

Sometimes, when product marketers enter dysfunctional environments, we unknowingly feed the dysfunction – and we have to stop. It's like the old movie rule: don't feed the Gremlins after midnight. Well, you shouldn’t feed the dysfunction either.

For the rest of this article, I'm going to share three ways that product marketers feed the dysfunction and how to stop doing this. These strategies will help you fix the information and decision-making dysfunctions in your organization.

Stop saying “I launch products”