In this week’s newsletter, I’m excited to introduce Notes, a new Condorsay feature that allows respondents to independently provide context for their top and bottom choices.
When aligning with others on important subjects, knowing *how* everyone feels is often less important than understanding *why* we feel that way.
I’ll elaborate with a hypothetical example:
During quarterly roadmapping for his ten-person team, Sam, a big tech PM, asks for a ranking on which projects to prioritize, and finds that Joanna, an engineer on his team, disagrees with the consensus of the group.
Given that the most highly ranked item is also his personal favorite, Sam is tempted to spin a story out of Joanna’s supposed motivations, reasoning that she is a junior engineer and couldn’t possibly have the context to contribute an informed opinion.
By the time the team prioritization meeting comes around, Sam’s disposition towards Joanna becomes unintentionally interrogatory, Joanna feels like her opinion isn’t valuable, and clams up instead of expressing the reason behind her ranking, which is her exclusive knowledge that her roommate’s team attempted the same thing the previous quarter to lackluster results.
Once we are exposed to the preferences of others, our human biases come into play and we are no longer neutral representatives of our own thoughts. This is why having the ability to fully express and aggregate our opinions independently of one another is foundational to extracting wisdom out of crowds. This is the motivating factor behind Notes, our new feature which allows Condorsay respondents to annotate their top and bottom choices with reasoning and context before exposure to the rest of the group.
When responding to a decision in Condorsay, you’ll now notice a new step at the end of the ranking process which asks for notes on your top and bottom choices, allowing you to contribute context before you’ve had a chance to see how you align with the group consensus.
We’ve redesigned the results screen to make use of these notes, elevating notes from those who disagree with the consensus to the overall summary, and providing a rich record of all notes in a new column (visible at the bottom on mobile devices) sorted in order of the group’s ranking.
We tested Notes this week by asking the r/HarryPotter subreddit to rank their favorite characters, and 200 people came by to offer their thoughts. The results were… magical. In addition to revealing Hermione as the most beloved character of the fandom, the decision showed a small, but passionate cohort of Dobby fans (myself included), passionately dissenting against his exclusion. (Becki: "Who doesn’t love Dobby? Happy with a sock and deep abiding love for his person….selfless").
As a Harry Potter fan, scrolling through the notes column gave me the sense of being briefly transported back to Hogwarts, reminding me of the depth of each character through the lenses of their most opinionated observers:
Back in the muggle world, our team used Notes this week to effectively collaborate on task prioritization for our current sprint, and I have used it as a journal to rank and annotate the values I want to show up with each week.
We hope that Notes helps create fruitful discussions with your team by elevating everyone’s contributions in service of better decisions. As always, please respond to this email with any questions or feedback.
With gratitude,
JB
This is my favorite newsletter so far! It is absolutely so common to assume someone’s motivation, which often turns out to be incorrect. It can be difficult to turn those thoughts and emotions around so that everyone feels safe to agree as well as disagree. Notes does that. Love the example! Love the tool!