Hello!
Back to looking at zombies and product teams! We’ve established three variants of zombies, they’re varied in their appearance and motivation but none of them are good news in your team, but how do you recognise when a zombie is in your midst? Or if you’re under siege, how do you escape?
From the three variants: possession, reanimation and viral, I’ll share how they can infect an aspect of a company or team.
Let’s start with the reanimation version, the classic 60s-70s zombie. Slow, lumbering, and generally a bit dim, the zombie embodies the shell of something that once was. A team without direction, following the easiest path? Zombies. A company chasing after small and quick wins in close vicinity, going after shiny objects with little care to surroundings, no vision. That’s a zombie team right there.
Now, a zombie team with no vision isn’t particularly dangerous, in fact, the reanimation zombie isn’t too bad an adversary, more an irritant than an offensive body, you could easily outpace the ghoul and keep out of it’s way. However if you’re part of the zombie team and want out, or have to deal with the dead, what’s the best way to load up get through?
The zombie’s primary prerogative is hunting to find sustenance. This base appetite of humanity only appears evil as the zombies’ chosen meal is human flesh. Discourse traditionally presents non-Haitian zombies as oppositional figures. Other supernatural creatures can evoke sympathy in their own fictions, however the zombie is unaware; Frankenstein’s monster, for example, describes its own tragedy: “I, the miserable and abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned, and kicked at, and trampled on”. Creators of zombie fictions tend to portray the creatures’ lack of reason as causative of some inherent evil. So they aren’t bad per-se, just hungry.
Appeal to the appetite and set the trap
To lure zombies to where you want to get them to you need to appeal to their most base desires, whilst a vision or mission would be great, you’ve got to go simpler. Money, power, prestige, all these things motivate individuals and teams. Ways you can do that in the product sphere is to prepare and season bait.
Prepping bait involves preparing business cases and clearly outlining steps to get people what they want. This is of course hard work, but surviving the zombie wasteland is never going to be easy. By doing all the prep and grunt work you can easily outline what needs to be done.
This work could include providing case studies, copious amounts of user research showing what the right thing to do is. Put in the work to get the bait together to lay out a clear path to lure the zombie where they want to get to and where you want to get them. It’s not always foolproof but it’s a clear and simple option.
Aim for the head
If appealing to the base appetite is not working, or something is too toxic and you need to cut through the zombies you need to aim for the head. What’s infected them? Is it an ideology, a culture, or just a simple practice?
Identify the cause of the zombie plague and work your way backwards to find out what points you can intervene. Is it a person who is making others into zombies with phrases like “don’t worry, that’s just the way things work around here.” Or “the users don’t know what they want until we give it to them” find that link and either cure it or remove it. Do it swiftly and don’t bother hacking around the arms and body, go straight for the brain. Don’t forget, the zombie would likely do the same to you.
If the cause of the zombie plague is a bit of an unknown figure do some investigations with individuals to find out what their motivations are, find out what the cause is and if it can be reversed or cure. Not all the harm can be undone, but something could be salvaged. Appeal to their intellect and look at the ideology behind it, but be careful, you don’t want to get bitten and become infected yourself.
Let ‘em fester and move along
Not all zombie movies have a happy ending, in fact most of them don’t. Whilst a protagonist may escape, humanity is often doomed, the masses have won, so maybe the best thing for you to do is to move along and escape if it’s an option.
Reanimation zombies may continue to bumble along and if you don’t have skin in the game and don’t believe that the team will do any harm apart from to themselves in the long run when they starve or just walk repeatedly into walls before slowly turning on each other, maybe move along. Find your tribe and take to the chopper finding solace in another area.
Guard your position
If you escape the zombie horde and find solace in your new society, well done you. Enjoy a freeze-dried meal and a beer, but be alert. Zombies are everywhere and before allowing new people into your tribe you’ve got to fully check them for the zombie infection. Sometimes they can be cured, but you don’t want to be the one to let the infection into your society, it spreads quickly and before you know it you have to find a new base.
I’m not saying there’s no route to redemption for many zombie product people, but you have to ensure they’re not carrying on the bad habits and grim ideologies that infected their last place of work. They may seem inane and slow, but that’s no reason to let them disrupt your environment.
Lumbering old zombies are a menace, they can be dangerous but their calmer demeanour and lack of speed and drive can lull people into a false sense of security. As long as they’re contained they’ll do no harm to anyone but themselves, slowly mulling around on autopilot. They’re insidious but can be controlled.
So some top takeaways for dealing with zombie product teams:
Try to drive change and culture within, making the right thing to do, the easiest thing.
Find the causes of zombification.
If you can’t save it, consider moving along.
Protect yourself and your team by hiring well.
The zombie odyssey continues.