I’ve worked in the technology industry for nearly 15 years. For most of that time, my job has been to lead people and organizations through change. It’s rarely easy, but always gratifying.
One very impactful story of change-upon-change involved an acquisition. I was working on the launch of a new set of teams — new people working together, new process to follow, even some new work to be done. Immediately after we launched under this new mode of operations, we acquired our main competitor. The very people we’d been looking to beat to the market with product offerings were going to be our new co-workers.
Over the following six months, as the slow mechanics of the acquisition unfolded, the biggest hurdle to get over wasn’t technical or product — it was ego. The company I worked for had a high opinion of itself and the products it produced. Getting an intimate look at the competing product that we’d just acquired was a new experience for a lot of people. And it ended up being a humbling one. They’d never seen the product in action, let alone taken the time to compare it to the product that our firm produced. And what they found was that the product we acquired was, in many respects, better than the product we produced.
But that reality didn’t stop egos from running wild.
Senior management down to the team members saw the acquisition as a victory for the company (which it kinda was). But the victory came with a tone of zero sum-ness. There was talk of “sun setting” the product line we acquired — and maybe even doing it quickly. That language made the people from the acquired firm feel inferior. After a few months of speculation, and the hard work of building relationships with our new colleagues and truly understanding their product line, reality set in. Both products would remain — giving customers the ability to choose what they wanted for now. That was a bitter pill for those who wanted to claim a zero sum game victory.
Even in the high stakes game of software product development — where millions of dollars in revenue, careers, and jobs hinge on the decisions that people make — change is hard. It takes time. Particularly when the thing that’s potentially being changed is the outcome of many years worth of work. And the reality of change in the world of business is that many of the things being changed are the outcome of lots of work, over lots of time, by lots of people. Legacies like that simply don’t change overnight. And neither did either product in this story. Even though an acquisition meant that both companies seemed to change overnight, the products that both firms produced continued on.
The Beach Boys — “Hang On To Your Ego”