How to manage HiPPOs in the workplace

We’ve all been there.

You’re at work having a productive team conversation about your priorities and agreeing on what you need to work on next to meet the strategic goals that’ve been set.

Then, the chief product officer joins the conversation and suggests what you really should be working on next.

You now feel obligated to do what this senior person has told you. That’s the priority now, rather than what you’d determined as important based on the strategic goals.

You’ve been “HiPPO’d!”

What is a HiPPO?

HiPPO stands for the “highest paid person’s opinion” and is used to indicate an approach to decision-making whereby the opinion of the most senior person in the room (typically the highest paid) carries more weight than the evidence or input of others.

Why HiPPO decision-making can be problematic

Within product management, the expectation is that you operate with a data-driven approach – setting objectives, measuring progress, and assessing performance to make decisions.

A HiPPO approach to decision-making goes against this approach because of the “o” of HiPPO.

Opinions can support an ideation process and lead to hypotheses but decisions should be based on data, not opinions.

Opinions can contain biases

In your life, you know that people carry biases and it’s the job of the product management team to see through these and not let them impact decision-making. However, when you’re influenced by HiPPOs you run the risk of becoming blind to them.

If you’re discussing your priorities and the marketing director walks in, they’ll potentially come at it with a marketing focus (e.g., let’s focus on the new campaign tool), whereas if the finance director walks in their opinion might take you in another direction (e.g., let’s focus on the new financial reports). Their role bias would influence your decision-making.

Of course, many types of biases could be present that could contribute to your decision-making and draw you away from your actual objective.

Opinions might lack data

We’ve all been in meetings where someone has said, “I feel like this is happening because of X,” and although feelings are sometimes useful to help us look in certain directions, you should always ask, “Where’s the data to back that up?”

When the chief commercial officer approaches the product team and says, “Our sales are down so there’s a problem with the checkout,” what’s not present is the data that shows that this is the case. There are many potential factors for a decline in sales and before any decisions get made, it’s important to understand the data rather than react to the opinion of the senior business leader.

Opinions can harm morale

Going back to the original scene at the start of this post, as a team, you’ve had a productive conversation about your priorities and agreed on what you need to work on next to meet the strategic goals that you’ve set. Then the senior manager joined the conversation and told you their view on what you should be doing next, which goes against the approach you’ve agreed as a team.

How does the team feel?

Does the fact that their decision-making has been dismissed motivate them to approach the work or is it likely to harm their morale? Now multiply this by every occasion where a HiPPO has overridden a team-determined decision and you can see how this might become problematic.

Opinions can stifle creativity

Another problematic outcome of making decisions based on the opinions of senior leaders is that it can stifle the creativity of the team, who begin to approach problems with the attitude of “What’s the point trying to be creative to address this when my suggestions will just be ignored in favor of the senior leader’s hunch?”

After operating like this for a while, teams will stop thinking for themselves and only start looking to their senior leaders for the solutions to problems, which narrows ideas, underutilizes individuals, and leads to poor decisions.

Opinions can create a hierarchy

Workplaces have tried to move away from layers and layers of hierarchy, with managers managing managers in a seemingly never-ending pyramid, however, if teams find themselves in a pattern of making decisions based upon the HiPPO, then the hierarchy surfaces in all groups.

Engineers acquiesce to lead engineers. Product managers do the same to CPOs. CPOs do the same to CEOs. Now you don’t have autonomous teams producing great solutions with their expertise, you have a series of decision-makers passing down instructions through the chain.

How can you manage HiPPOs in your workplace?

Just because you find yourself in a situation where the opinions of senior leaders drive team activity doesn’t mean that you can’t change the situation. Teams need to take steps to change this dynamic and can do so in several ways.

Provide relevant and timely information to senior managers

The strongest cure to the HiPPO situation is providing the senior managers with the relevant information that can underpin their opinions.

If you’ve been able to provide senior leaders with data that shows the current performance of the checkout then when there is a drop in sales their immediate response would be to consult the data not jump to a conclusion about a negative checkout performance.

Encourage data-driven discussions

Providing this information to senior leaders will encourage conversations focused on data and not on pure opinions, which can be used to influence conversations about future plans.

When developing product roadmaps the activities presented in it should all be accompanied with clear data that justifies their inclusion so that all discussions are based on “the facts.”

• Feature A is focused on meeting OKR B and delivering an increase in metric C of Y percent
• Feature B will seek to reduce metric C by D% whilst providing the groundwork for future feature E

Now you find yourself having a conversation around the outcomes for the organization rather than a preference over features A or B.

Promote a culture of openness and collaboration

The final area to focus on is providing a culture of openness within the organization.

Part of the problem with the HiPPO is that the seniority of the HiPP weighs heavily on the conversation and teams feel obligated to follow what’s been said.

Teams and team leaders should find an approach that encourages collaboration and rewards participation and honesty.

This can start through introducing mechanisms that seek feedback in a more egalitarian manner, such as brainstorming to collect ideas or post-it notes to gather more anonymous feedback.

Once teams are comfortable with being able to provide their views in a way that makes them feel listened to and contributing then they’ll be more armed to address instances where senior manager’s opinions surface.

Final thoughts

Of course, not all opinions from senior leaders are bad.

There is a reason why the individual has become the highest paid person in the room and that’s typically because they have extensive experience and can provide valuable insights, so just because they are the senior person it doesn’t mean their view should be discounted completely.

The approach should be to put this alongside the other factors in making a decision and provide it the appropriate level of weight it deserves.

In addition, senior leaders are paid to be decisive, inspire confidence, and give direction, which means sometimes their opinion can help teams make steps forward when perhaps they’re struggling to find a path.

The important thing is to find a balance within the workplace so that the organization makes the best decisions it can to move forward and be successful.

Featured image source: IconScout