Mastering Imposed Deadlines: The Top-Down Organizational Culture

As we saw in the previous article, Imposing Deadlines: A Challenge for the Product Team, it is very common to encounter imposed delivery dates in your product development from the business or management side. This presents a significant challenge for your team and can create the first major gap between expectations and execution, complicating the achievement of the desired quality of a new feature or functionality.

In that last post, you discovered the most common reasons for this imposition, and you already saw that there are many. So, let's delve deeper into each one in the following articles.

Let's discover together how you can adapt to each situation and achieve the best result for your product, your team, and your company.

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How to Deal with a “Top-Down” Organizational Culture?

In companies where decisions are made at higher levels without sufficient consultation with the responsible teams, it is very common to encounter unrealistic deadlines, far from reality, which are unlikely to meet the expectations of those who made the decision. But what can we do in this context?

Surely, as a Product Manager, you will want tools to change the culture and achieve a product vision and horizontal decision-making. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that, no matter how much you wish for it, you cannot change the organizational culture in the short term. From positions with limited power, it is difficult to modify the management culture or that of an entire company. If you take that path, you will wear yourself out and get frustrated, achieving little, and eventually leaving with quite negative consequences for yourself, your team, and your colleagues.

In this situation, you must either accept the culture or leave. There is no other option. If you don’t accept it, the healthiest thing you can do is explore other alternatives.

If you accept it, you must be aware of the rules of the game and try to manage them well, understanding your limits. If you want to deal with imposed deadlines in a top-down company, the key is to try to convey the team’s perspective to the upper layers. And, for this, you need a communication strategy focused on the interests of those making the decisions.

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“When you speak, think about what interests the other person”

In the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, it is explained that focusing our communication on our own motives and interests when trying to change someone else's point of view is generally not effective, as most people are not interested in these aspects. However, if when you speak with someone, you think about what interests the other person and express your ideas in a way that they are perceived as beneficial to their goals, your ability to convey and influence your interlocutor multiplies. This way, both parties will benefit.

In conclusion, if you want to modify a date imposed by management, you will have to speak in their language to get your message across. Analyze what they want to achieve and what motivated them to impose that date, what their objectives and interests are.

Now, is it realistic to meet that date? If not, can you cut down the scope and partially meet the objectives? Can you reduce the quality of the product and still make it? These are questions you need to be prepared to answer, especially to draft an alternative proposal.

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Adapt to the Situation

If we cannot change the date, the question is: can we modify the scope? Can we adjust expectations? Remember that if you know how to manage your stakeholders' expectations, you will have their trust, and that empowers you to gain control over the what, how, and when.

Draft an alternative plan, divide the request into features or functionalities that you can deliver independently, and order them by the value they bring to the final objective (remember Pareto's law, 20% of the work brings 80% of the benefit), and measure the effort of each over time.

This will help you play with scopes and efforts while having a global vision. Adjust those tasks and features to achieve the maximum objective with a first delivery on the proposed date and mark the rest of the deliveries to achieve 100%. Also, don’t forget to list the risks of not meeting the full scope in the first delivery, both for the business and the end user.

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Adjusting Dates and Expectations

Finally, it is time to communicate your analysis. You can do this in a meeting with your boss, in a product committee with management, or even via email communication. Start with management’s objectives and how you will help them achieve them. Present the facts, show the analysis, and leave the decision in management’s hands.

With this exercise, you will get them to reconsider their objectives and adjust their expectations. Here, two things can happen: either they adjust the date or the scope. If not, since not everything is under your control, at least you will have adjusted their expectations to what is realistically achievable.

This exercise in the long term will also help make the imposition of a date without consulting the team less frequent, but for this, you will need to meet the dates set by your plan and gradually gain more and more trust.

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Conclusion

As you can see, it is not easy to deal with a top-down culture where dates are imposed, but there are mechanisms to adapt and influence decision-making. Or at least, convey the product team’s message to the management layers that decide your fate.

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