[larve]

Thank you for reading. I think this is a salient point. How do I know how the manager is going to perceive the question based on what order I put the words in? My intent is to get the information I need, because I trust the manager to know it when I don’t. This of course is an edited example of a conversation in real life, and in fact my first draft had the question phrased as “we should analyze our performance and need metrics”. This honestly could have just as easily been perceived as patronizing.

If anything, and I probably glossed over it too quickly, I do spend a lot of effort being very candid and open and agreeable when having these discussions, because it is so hard to make sure our intents and definitions are aligned. We can be talking about checkout and react and then after 2 h realize that we actually both care about better conversion of mobile users, and now we are talking and can put the react decision into context.

I wrote this article about these situations: when my approach breaks down and I get blamed for not accepting being wrong, yet I’m actually trying my best to avoid exactly that.