[rarecoil]

> One needs to work hard to keep up personal relationships with product/sales/project management/etc to ensure that the level of trust is there to be able to have the hard conversations.

In the heat of the moment, on deadline with a bunch of bugs and yet multiple compliance hurdles to clear, with a short-staffed team and conflicting management priorities, it's pretty easy to lose sight of the common goal.

Microsoft has a nice cliche you can use when you catch yourself on the adversarial end of this type of conversation: "assume positive intent". It's written on most of the Redmond campus whiteboards. If we are all assuming positive intent, it can give us the right empathetic mindset with which to build this trust even when it seems difficult. I've found working with other teams through the hard conversations with compromise instead of "no" leads to better results. They're assuming positive intent as am I and it's OK. If I'm feeling something is adversarial I need to understand why.

[jaggederest]

I like to frame it as "not me versus you, us versus the problem" when things get too heated. Otherwise things degrade into ad hominem "Those goddamn X people", instead of "We're having a lot of problems getting our project to work with X"

[rarecoil]

I like this one, too. The moment the people are your adversary in a technical discussion, you have probably lost sight of the actual problem. Much of the time I find it's misaligned incentives or, as Amy wrote here, sometimes it's people working with obsolete context or old grudges. Reframing yourself first, and then the discussion, is very much the way to succeed.

[sdbrown]

My partner is a physician, and this is _exactly_ how they manage disagreements about treatment plans, almost by instinct. It is amazing how well this works at clearing things up.