Ideas without egos: deciding together when everyone has a favourite

Ego is not the same as knowledge

The person who defends an idea most fiercely is seldom the one who knows the most. Ego tends to originate elsewhere: in immaturity, in insecurity, in the fear that if my idea loses, I lose with it. Genuine knowledge is usually quieter. It is curious about the alternatives, because it has nothing to prove.

When ego governs a discussion, entire phases of a project stall. Discovery turns into a debating society, research is enlisted to win arguments rather than to learn, and the team gradually stops proposing anything that might provoke a quarrel.

Why my favourite doesn’t matter to the product

The product does not know who proposed an idea, and the people using it don’t care. What matters to them is whether it solves their problem. My favourite idea is useful only if it withstands the same questions as everyone else’s: who it serves, what it fixes and how we will know it has worked.

Where a CPO comes in

As a product director, I carry more influence in that room than most, which is precisely why I must exercise it with care. There is a well-known term for what happens otherwise: the HiPPO, the highest paid person’s opinion, which prevails quietly because nobody wishes to contest it. My task in that room is to ensure that the best idea can win, even when it is not mine.

How we decide together

In practice, a handful of habits do most of the work. We agree on what a good solution must achieve before anyone presents one, so that ideas are measured against those criteria rather than against one another’s authors. Once an idea is on the board, it no longer bears a name; it belongs to the team.

I try to speak last, because if I say what I think first, half the room agrees before it has had time to think. And when two good ideas compete, a rapid prototype or a brief conversation with users usually settles the matter faster, and more fairly, than yet another meeting.

Fail, fail, fail, and then the big idea

None of this works if people experience a rejected idea as a personal failure. Amy Edmondson calls the missing ingredient psychological safety: the shared sense that you can say something half-formed without being penalised for it. In practice, it means treating every idea that does not survive as fuel for the one that does.

Most of the significant ideas I have seen were the fifth or sixth iteration of something that first failed. Those who proposed the first four were not mistaken; they were the reason the fifth existed. Once a team grasps that, failure ceases to be embarrassing and becomes the very means by which the work advances.

Growing past your own ego

Something changes in people who pass through this a few times. They no longer need to win, and they grow genuinely interested in what others perceive. Their thinking broadens, and they become capable of holding several ideas at once without feeling threatened by any of them. I see it in juniors and in seniors. It was part of my own path too, not because ego ever led me, but because granting every idea room before judging it is something you keep learning.

And once you become aware of that change, it carries a modest obligation: to pass it on, by giving the next person in the room the space someone once gave you. Strong opinions are perfectly fine. Holding them a little more lightly is what makes a team.