Managing Conflict

Product managers and designers spend a lot of effort avoiding conflict, yet they deal with it regularly: working with other teams, giving constructive criticism and engaging with divergent points of view. In this talk at Mind the Product San Francisco in 2015, Rochelle King, who has led user experience and design at Netflix and Spotify, argues that agitating the creative process through conflict can lead to rich discussions.

Conflict is exhausting, so her first point is to understand what you are fighting for and make sure it is worthy, rather than being contrarian for its own sake. Her tips: establish clearly identified success metrics that are closely aligned with what users are doing; seek out people with opposing views and ask them to debate your ideas, which gives useful early feedback in a safe environment; resolve conflicts by opening the product to users and letting the data help decide; and look for patterns in conflicts and their resolution so future conflicts can be mitigated.

Above all, engage in conflict to learn, not to win. Even if you don’t enjoy it, embracing conflict pushes the creative process and helps teams build better products.