It is not a bad thing to have an unoriginal thought.

In a recent 1:1, one of my ICs was telling me about how they were had a conversation with another person about a planning document. My IC noticed something in the document and had a question about it. Their first instinct was

Surely someone else has had this thought and brought up the question.

But they pushed through that uncomfortable feeling and asked anyways. The other person told them

If we hadn’t had this 5 minute conversation, there would have been no way for me to learn that.

This reminds me of a phrase I had heard recently. What is obvious to you is revolutionary to someone else. My team has spent years getting their hands dirty in one particular data set, and we had just completed another major project to improve the quality and usability of that data. My team member was an expert on this data and how it connected to other data sets. The person they were talking to was in a more strategic role. Both of them have conversations with a lot of people at the company, but it’s still risky to assume that a thought has been discussed before.

In our 1:1 I told my team member that it’s not a bad thing to have an unoriginal thought. As part of the product development team, we should all be thinking about how different product decisions should be weighed. Part of that is through estimating the impact, confidence, and ease of our work. If 10 different people have the same thought, that’s a good signal that an idea should be investigated further. It’s not enough to make a strategic decision, but maybe it’s enough to increase the urgency of some experimentation to determine the priority of that idea in comparison to all the other ones we have.

In management they say that a manager needs to repeat themselves at least 7 times before a message will stick. In product management, repetition is also a valuable signal.

What if they steal my idea?

In a lot of companies, people often worry about not getting credit for their ideas. It’s a valid concern. If you’re coming up with lots of great ideas without being credited, that could be career limiting for you.

Our department is curation, we are obsessed with data provenance. We’ve also invested a lot of time and effort into building a psychologically safe environment where people trust and respect each other. Based on these values, the team is always sure to credit people in open discussions for their ideas and contributions. Names are always associated with ideas in Jira Product Discovery, planning documents, shoutouts in the weekly department meeting, wins in the company-wide Slack channel, and I try to highlight their successes in leadership meetings and 1:1s with my boss as well. We’ve developed a lot of mechanisms to make sure people get the credit they deserve.

Wrapping up

In a psychologically safe team you should repeat yourself often, and also repeat the ideas of the people on your team (with credit) as often as you can. By repeating these ideas, it adds weight to them. It’s a great way to advocate for the expertise of your team, and making sure that good ideas get the consideration they deserve.