The meeting went well. Everyone agreed that an order should be marked complete once it has shipped. Three weeks later the reports are wrong, finance is annoyed, and it turns out that to the warehouse team shipped means it left the building, to the payments team it means the customer was charged, and to your team it meant the status field changed.
Nobody got it wrong. Each team used the word correctly by its own definition. That is precisely why the problem survives every meeting: the word sounds shared, so nobody thinks to check it.
The dangerous words are rarely the technical ones. Everybody asks what a technical term means. It is the ordinary business words that do the damage. Customer, account, active, user, complete, deleted, released, available. Each of them hides two or three meanings across any company of a reasonable size, and each meaning is perfectly sensible inside the team that uses it.
So develop an ear for them. When a conversation between two teams hinges on one of these words, stop and ask the small, slightly awkward question. When you say active, what exactly has to be true? Ask for the condition, not a synonym. Active means logged in within ninety days is a definition. Active means currently using it is just the same word wearing a different coat.
Then write the answer down where both teams will find it, next to the thing it governs. A short list of five or six words and what each team means by them saves more hours than most design documents, and it gets read, because people search for it when they are confused.
When the meanings genuinely differ, do not force one team to give up theirs. Both are usually correct for the work they do. Give each meaning its own name instead. Shipped from warehouse and payment captured are longer to say and impossible to confuse.
The skill here is not better writing. It is suspicion of agreement that came too easily. If two groups who work very differently agreed in ten minutes, check what they agreed on.
– Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)