Sometimes you have to choose between two or more bad options. Often the perfect choice is a luxury that you can’t afford.

The question is how you respond to this choice, and how you communicate it to your team. I believe you have two options:

• You can act purely as a messenger, or
• You can take responsibility and ownership of the decision, and explain to your team enough of the background to the decision that they understand and accept it.

It’s easy to go with option 1 – to throw up your hands and say “well it wasn’t my decision” – it’s always easier to be a victim – but option 1 is poisonous because it builds in your team an inherent distrust of management and a dissolves belief in your product strategy. And in the long run, if you always play ‘the messenger’, your team won’t only lose faith in your company, they’ll lose faith in you.

Option 2 is hard… but get it right, and it’s art. And sooner or later the messenger gets shot anyway.

Welcome to my blog. 

My name is Will. I grew up on the east coast of Australia, studied and started my career in Sydney, and 2 years ago I followed my girl and my heart to Berlin, Germany. I now work for Nokia. I am the Product Owner of Nokia’s web social location platform, maps.ovi.com. 

I thought the best way to start out would be to come up with something of a mission statement for this blog. Basically, I’d like to share:

• my thoughts and experiences in the world of agile software and product development
• my observations and thoughts on the web world in general
• my thoughts on creating change and building products and systems of value

I must admit; my motives are selfish… I want to force myself to consolidate my thoughts. I want to give myself a deadline of one blog post per week (to start with) to make sure I take the time every week to reflect and to learn. 

Despite my selfish motives, I hope you find something valuable for you here, and I hope you find something to take away. 

Thanks for dropping by.

Cheers,
Will.