Changing roles within Product - A story of quitting
Should I stay or should I go?
I just finished reading the book Quit, The Power Of Knowing When To Walk Away, from
. With today’s nugget, I wanted to run a hypothetical case. Imaging if your boss offers you two choices to progress on your product career. One was keep on the current path, and the other was another role still in the same area / domain, but covering a different ground, doing things in a different way you might have done it so far.
Now, you may wonder, what does it has to do with quitting? Well let me tell you that if you’ve been following the “traditional” career path, you would have persisted moving on that journey or you could have quit that one and explore something different.
In this scenario, there is a decision that has to be made, which involves pushing into the same direction, or abandoning what you have been doing so far.
What I wanted to do with this exercise, is to expose many of the biases and cognitive traps that Annie describes on her book, which by the way I recommend to buy, and see how you can apply them when quitting is part of the equation.
Sunk-cost fallacy
One of the most interesting things I’ve learned by reading the book is that, when we have to make a decision about the future whether we continue to spend more, we always take into account time, effort, or any other resource (money could be another one) we have previously sunk into an endeavour. Instead, we should consider if continuing on the same path has a positive expected value.
Advice: Thinking in expected value, although you might have been offered to move into another role, based on what you know, would it have made any difference? Would you have gotten more exposure? Would the new role catch you attention entirely? What about changing the line of reporting? What if changing gives you a different perspective, doing things you like more. Everything has tradeoffs though, you would have to exercise your superpowers on that front as well.
(Sure) Loss aversion
Loss aversion is one of the pillars of the prospect theory. It recognises that the emotional impact of a loss is greater than the corresponding impact of an equivalent gain. Losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us. Think about it, in my situation, leaving my current team would be twice as harder as working with a new team or even taking a new position that is not similar to the previous one.
Advice: There is a nice quote on the book which is Quit while you’re ahead…when the path you are on is on a losing proposition. Think about the things you wouldn’t be doing or learning if keep spending energy on things that you have done already.
Escalation of commitment
When we’re getting “bad” news or strong signals that we’re losing, we don’t refuse to quit. We will double and triple down, committing more time, money (and other resources) toward the losing cause, and we will strengthen our belief that we are on the right path.
Advice: Although “losing” seems a very strong word, What would the feeling have been if you remain doing what you are doing? You might get the idea that by staying and persisting at your current endeavour you will progress and build something meaningful, that might be the case for a period of time. But the key is to know when it becomes business as usual, and not learning as much. Something to think about is the following quote:
Grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.
Status-quo bias
The previous is a predicament of status-quo bias. Simply, the status quo represents the path you’re already or the way you’ve always done things. The bias comes in when individuals overwhelmingly stick with the status quo option, even when the option that is associated with a lower expected value.
Advice: reinforcing the idea of keeping the status quo, would staying in the current situation have represented something of lower value than the other option? That should force you to think twice. The status quo represents a mental account what we have already open, which has a sunk cost associated with it. Imagine that I wouldn’t have created a mark in your current roll, that could have played against your willingness to move into another position. As the book states:
Aversion of closing the account on the losses, escalation of commitment, fear of being unable to complete them / falling short makes us not want to start.
Omission-commission bias
Which leads to omission-commission bias. We are much more concerned with errors of commission than errors of omission (failures to act). We’re more wary of “causing” a bad outcome by acting than “letting it happen” through inaction.
Advice: in this hypothetical situation, switching to the new position, is perceived as a new decision, and an active one. What happens, is that we don’t view the choice to stick with the actual option as a decision at all. What we don’t see is that deciding not change, and stick to the status quo, is itself a decision. It is important to realise that by staying in the current role, you could miss learnings that could add into your experience. Think about the opportunity-cost when you have to choose between staying or going.
Endowment effect
The idea that you fall in love with your ideas, and whey you start a course of action and as you make subsequent decisions to continue on that course of action, you are accruing more sunk cost, and more attached to your ideas, to the belief that you’re on the right course.
Advice: You could have said that your team or boss are the best one you ever interacted with, that you have the best way of working. That idea reinforces the effect of value more your team or boss, whereas other team or initiative could have been a better choice in terms of learnings, challenges ahead, or progression. This is when having a clear introspection of where you want to go and progress, combined with a systemic view, could bring clarity about other things that could be more beneficial. Sometimes a coach is one of the greatest gifts to remove the distortion the endowment effect creates.
Conclusion
It’s hard to decide whether to keep pursuing your dream by staying on the same path (grit) or going elsewhere (quit). In most of the situations we have to deal with incomplete information in a world that is stochastic.
In order to avoid the previous biases and cognitive dissonace clouding our judgement, there are many tools mentioned in the book we should leverage. Always consider the opportunity cost and the expected value of quitting. When possible, lay all the risks out by using premortems and external help, someone who may not have a stake in the game and come with a fresh view.
I would like to close this nugget today with the following quote from the book.
What makes it so hard to quit, if we were to sum up everything we have talked about in this book, is that when we quit, we fear two things: that we have failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money.
We need to redefine what “failed” and “wasted” mean.
When we worry that quitting means we’ve failed, what exactly are we failing at? If you quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing, that’s not a failure. That’s a success.