Choosing Your Battles: The Strategic Art of Tech and Product Leadership
True value isn't in every fight
Throughout my two decades of experience in the digital realm, I've understood a fundamental truth: an effective leader isn't defined so much by the battles they fight as by those they consciously choose not to engage in.
This particularly intense week reminded me of this lesson with striking clarity. Between deploying new features, technical architecture challenges, and budget arbitrations, opportunities for confrontation were abundant. Yet it's precisely in these moments of intensity that discernment becomes our greatest ally.
Cognitive economy: a precious and limited resource
Our cognitive capacity is a limited and precious resource. As all agile methodologies emphasize, and as Lean pushes forward, isn't the biggest waste for a company to offer products that aren't what the customer actually needs?
This question brings us back to the essentials. Each battle we fight consumes cognitive energy that's no longer available to identify and solve problems that truly bring value to our customers.
Leading a Digital Factory with 300 employees spread across various disciplines (product, tech, cloud, UX, data) as I currently do at Bpifrance means facing a multitude of potential challenges daily. The temptation to optimize everything, perfect everything, control everything is great. But this approach is a trap.
Differentiating signal from noise
One of the most crucial skills I've developed is the ability to distinguish signal from noise - to identify among the multitude of potential problems those that truly deserve our collective attention.
The Lean Tech Manifesto, written by Benoit Charles-Lavauzelle and Fabrice Bernhard, offers an illuminating perspective on this subject. The first pillar it identifies is "Value for the customer as the compass point of all activities." This is the compass that should guide our choice of battles.
In practice, this means that every potential confrontation, every disagreement, every organizational friction must be evaluated through a simple but powerful question: "Will solving this problem create significant value for our users?"
The Team Topologies approach: clarifying responsibilities to avoid unnecessary battles
The Team Topologies model offers a particularly relevant framework for avoiding territorial conflicts that consume so much energy in our organizations.
By clearly defining four types of teams (stream-aligned, platform, complicated-subsystem, and enabling) and their interaction modes (collaboration, X-as-a-service, facilitating), this model helps clarify responsibilities and expectations. I actually discuss this in this article.
I've observed that many "battles" emerge precisely from gray areas where responsibilities overlap without being clearly defined. The Team Topologies approach doesn't eliminate all conflicts, but it makes them more productive by centering them on value delivery rather than territorial issues.
Gemba: seeing the reality on the ground
Another fundamental Lean principle that helps me judiciously choose my battles is Gemba - the idea of directly observing where work happens, where value is created.
Too often, disagreements and tensions between teams arise from divergent perceptions of reality, fueled by abstractions and unverified hypotheses. Going to the field, directly observing users, analyzing real usage data - these practices help bring discussions back to concrete facts rather than opinions.
At the Digital Factory, we've instituted regular "Gemba walk" sessions where product and tech managers together observe users and data. This simple practice has considerably reduced unproductive discussions by creating a common foundation of indisputable facts.
Capitalizing on knowledge: avoiding reinventing the wheel
One of the major types of waste, which encompasses almost all others, is having to reinvent everything repeatedly without properly capitalizing on acquired knowledge.
This observation is particularly relevant to our topic. How many "battles" in our organizations are actually recurring confrontations about problems that have already been encountered and theoretically solved?
Implementing effective mechanisms for knowledge capitalization and sharing is therefore an essential strategy for reducing unnecessary friction. In my teams, we've developed a rigorous discipline of documenting decisions and their justifications, which often allows us to avoid reopening debates that have already been concluded.
The art of Obeya: making visible to avoid conflicts
One of the most powerful tools I've adopted to reduce unproductive friction is Obeya - this Japanese practice of gathering all crucial information about a project in one space.
Obeya allows us to display all the elements on which teams are working. This radical transparency considerably reduces misunderstandings and erroneous hypotheses that are often at the origin of conflicts.
By making our indicators and major ongoing changes visible to everyone, we create a common language that transcends specialties and silos. Discussions cease to be confrontations of opinions and become collective analyses of shared facts.
Redefining our priorities in the face of technological disruptions
The question of which battles to fight takes on a new dimension in an era where AI is profoundly transforming our professions and where consumption patterns of our products are undergoing accelerated mutations.
In this context of transformation, choosing one's battles also becomes an exercise in foresight. Some battles of yesterday, which seemed essential, become secondary in the face of new priorities imposed by these changes.
At Bpifrance, we're finding that the emergence of generative AI is radically transforming the expectations of our users, entrepreneurs, and partners. Features that previously required weeks of development can now be automated. User journeys we thought were optimal are suddenly obsolete in the face of new behaviors.
This reality forces us to constantly reevaluate our portfolio of potential "battles." Projects that seemed priority six months ago may today represent a sub-optimal investment of our limited resources.
The question is no longer just "Which battles are worth fighting?" but also "Which battles will still be relevant in six months, one year, three years?"
Conclusion: the leader as a cultivator of constructive battles
While choosing one's battles is essential, it doesn't mean avoiding all forms of conflict. Some confrontations are necessary and productive - those that push us to question our assumptions, refine our understanding of real needs, and innovate.
As Bpifrance's Group CIO Lionel Chaine often reminds us, there are healthy conflicts - this "abrasion" between teams that, when well channeled, becomes a powerful engine for innovation and improvement. This constructive friction allows for confronting ideas, refining solutions, and strengthening our collective resilience.
The true art of leadership isn't so much about avoiding battles as creating the conditions for them to take place in a constructive framework, centered on value, anchored in facts, and oriented toward collective learning.
As the Lean Tech Manifesto affirms, our ultimate goal is to "enable the organization to learn continuously to develop resilience to change." This capacity for continuous learning is precisely what will allow us to meet the increasingly complex challenges that the digital world holds for us.
I would be very curious to know your own strategies for judiciously choosing your battles in your respective contexts!
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