What do you do?
How the answer to this question is an organisational litmus test.
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TLDR
The simple question, “What do You Do?” or, more specifically, the answer you receive when you ask it, provides massive insight into the health of an organisation and its people.
Put simply, it immediately shows the person and their team's demeanour, pride in, and outcome of what they do. Getting teams and individuals to answer this clearly will give you teams with drive and direction who will move the needle for you.
You have an uphill task to make any difference where this is missing. Given this power, we look at the barriers that exist from the personal to team and organisation and how, despite these, you can still start to get you and your teams to confidently know what they are doing to benefit your organisation and your customers.
Introduction
A simple question can tell you a lot about how well an organisation works and how well the team gets things done. We have all been asked that question at parties, on holidays, conferences, work meetings, and in many other situations. That question is:
What do you do?
But the most exciting part isn’t the question but the response and the power that giving a fantastic answer has for you, your team and your organisation.
The Psychology
At some point in your life, you asked, “What do you do?” and had your socks blown off by the answer. The speed of the response, confident delivery, crisp wording, and the smile on their face. This was what they did, that they had pride in, something that they had agency in and energy to give to, and that was so easily conveyed to you.
But at the same time, the opposite is also true. You will have met people who thought it unnecessary to answer and deflect. Or people who say, sadly, I’m a (insert unappealing job title here), with all the enthusiasm of a piece of wet paper.
Beware also of corporate BS that touts a mission, such as “We provide solutions to the corporate space requirements industry.” At once, this fails the straightforward communication test. Try saying that last phrase out loud, honestly, with energy and purpose.
So, what you do matters, but why? Let's examine the effect of a clear answer on people and teams.
What does a great answer do for an individual or team?
Let's go from the outside in.
Work is all about communication, whether with a supplier, a customer, a partner, or a related team. Great answers to “What do you do?” clearly communicate the essence of what you or your team does. Communication is all about messages received and understood. Great answers start you off on the right foot.
The tone and energy of its delivery are carried along with the words, making for very effective communication with an energised partner.
So, where first impressions matter, having a great way to answer “What do you do?” is the world’s best business card.
As product managers, you are likely already aware of the importance of clear communication. When people think you are a project manager, you end up describing an entire mindset before you can get to what you actually do. Understanding the importance of your role, where you make an impact, and being able to communicate this concisely across your organisation is crucial.
Let’s go down a level to the team and the individual.
Having a straightforward way to answer gives you and your team confidence, which is evident in the external nature of communication and internally in challenging, encouraging, and supporting team members in day-to-day work.
Let's take this deeper.
Working on the answer as a team helps to bond the team with a shared purpose. The to-and-fro of defining this helps to centre and build the team.
It also provides a shield to deflect activity that isn’t core to what the team does. This answer empowers the whole team, from the most junior to the most seasoned, to say, hang on, that doesn’t help us achieve what we are trying to do. It provides focus to the team.
Finally, let's zoom out and look across teams and organisations
So, you run a set of teams or an organisation. Why does having every team with a clear purpose help you, someone with many responsibilities?
Firstly, as the coach of those teams, giving them agency to define their purpose is mighty. Agency here means giving them the power and responsibility to make decisions and take action. While you may coach the team in communicating what they focus on, giving them the power to craft it is a big vote of trust in them.
Secondly, you now have a set of explicit activities your team carries out to help you better define your own organisation's capabilities.
Thirdly, the extraneous things that don’t add value or matter, or the missing, vital things, get the proper treatment. Teams either drop them or adopt them.
At this stage, defining what the broader team or organisation does is often valuable. Again, to achieve the same aims, communicate clearly, establish confidence and agency, trust, and help organisations focus.
I hope we have made the case for great answers to “What are you doing?” But this isn’t easy; the number of people or organisations who cannot answer this question well shows that.
Barriers
We know that we don’t always get great answers to the question, “What do you do?”. So let's analyse the barriers organisations create to make this difficult, from the very top down to the front line.
Organisation Structure
Defining what you do requires delegating, not a task, but the ownership of an outcome to a person or a team; however, it is also up to you and your team to consider dividing up the roles best for the organisation. There are many ways to do this, all with pros and cons. I have explored these more in my article Stop Being Dependent on Dependencies. In short, if you have set up your organisation to have lots of overlap and connections between teams, then clear purpose and delivery cannot follow. Get it right, and then teams can collaborate where needed but have the agency, ownership, and ability to move the needle independently.
Mission Statements
I am all for a clear mission, but too often, mission statements could be better communication. They frequently look alike and don’t resonate. They are an exercise covering all the bases, more a statement of “we do all this”, than “we exist to do that.”
Mission misstatements are a challenge because an organisation that doesn’t notice poor communication is unlikely to have employees who know what they do and may not value or see the value in a team that is clear on what they do.
Like the what do you do answer, sniff out corporate BS and ensure that your mission helps your teams understand how they can support the mission.
Departments
When people organise organisations, you get departments, often collections of teams with similar responsibilities. However, similar to the Job Title problem below, the name of a department can be an excellent or poor guide to what they do. Sales is straightforward to understand, but Corporate Services has many definitions. Words matter. Think about what you call your department; it’s a calling card for your peers and customers.
Job Titles
In my time, I have had many official job titles, often with little connection to what I did. For example, feel free to comment below on what you think a “Functional Designer” is ( I’ll let you know in the follow-up article on how to write great answers; remember to subscribe for updates). However, for those who lead teams, their job title can again distract teams from focusing on what they do. If you are the Director of Systems Integration, all your teams should integrate systems, but I bet you have ownership of a lot more. Again, beware that your job title might give your teams the wrong message about what your department does.
Modesty
The last barrier is, I suspect, more cultural than anything else, but any individual's feelings also influence it. Here in the UK, we naturally adopt a more modest tone; being clear about what you do requires setting this aside a little. We aren’t asking you to brag but to be clear about what you do and why.
But What Can I do?
I apologise for the long list of reasons this is difficult, but it is best to be aware of them. So, what can you do about it?
Get to know your teams - Working out the what and how of answering what a team does requires psychological safety. Get to know your teams and start building this.
Get your teams to know what they own and do. Examples include architecture diagrams, customer journeys, service blueprints, and process flows. Encourage the team to find a way to collectively know what they do and play it back to others. They are finding their voice and telling their story.
Connect what they share with your organisation's suppliers and customers. Process maps should go end to end, even if your team is just a step in the process. Connect what they do to something everyone can understand.
Get them to augment this with data on the volume, number of, frequency, cost, earnings, sales, etc. Make this specific with numbers.
Always ask the team, “What do you do?” even when you know they are stating this to help reinforce their ownership and agency.
Support the team in exploring what they do. Be ready to help them with those pieces they don’t own but need and those they own that get in the way of their core purpose. Key teams never arrive fully formed - they grow into them.
Support your team as they learn to have a voice, it helps them communicate what they do with their peers. Where possible, always let them tell others what they do.
Ask them “what they do” when they ask you about scope. Give the team the power to define what they do and use this to make intelligent decisions.
Repeat with all other teams.
Here is an example from a prominent global organisation. A team told me that they owned a B2B API. They were a team in an organisation that no one could ever say was a B2B organisation. Such an answer gave them a communication challenge; outside their team, they weren’t talking in their organisation's language, and it was hard to understand how they could make a difference inside the team.
Together, we worked to help them map out their responsibilities. There were surprises, and in the process, everyone learned more about their team, even those who thought they knew it all. Then followed a couple of weeks of revising the work they had produced and playing it back to others to make sure it communicated well, and then the team worked on its answer to: What do you do?
Their new definition of what that team does is connecting the very best of what the UK produces to its global audience of millions of people each day. We do this through over 30 partners. (The actual definition is even more powerful but would giveaway the team and organisation, though some of the team that did this work are reading this, so now I owe them a beer for the story.) Now, the team and their coaches are using this new-found voice to understand how we can do more, better, and more efficiently, and we are supporting them in this.
What follows
Before we wrap up (And you subscribe to get the follow-up Product Breaks article on how to create these), know that getting a great definition of what you do is just a start. When a team has this, they will ask better questions to help them do this work better. Questions like:
“How can we get access to x….”
and
“We want to stop looking after y because it isn’t core to what we do.”
are almost inevitable. The answer to “What do you do?” is the start of a journey to a more efficient set of capabilities that will allow an organisation to do what it does better.
Close
So next time you ask, “What do you do?” know that you have just run an organisation's most potent litmus test.
If the answer excites you, join them and work with them; if it is anything else, then it is time for that organisation and you as a leader to roll up your sleeves and get to work. Your organisation's success depends on it.
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