More often than not, smart and successful people often view their past performance as a guarantee of future success. The result is that you need to know how to manage these individuals without the organization's loss of vision being felt by stakeholders, sponsors or customers.
The Hi.PPO They are usually highly maligned. He always finds enemies among data scientists and user experience professionals. If there is a decision to be made, the boss always wins. After all, there must be a reason you get paid more.
The Hi.PPO is usually an easy profile to handle. It is much more delicate to act against the opinion of the ZEBRA
Although the Hi.PPO has a terrible internal decision making process, and in the end it usually ends in 3 reasons.
- tests are expensive. This can be true for small companies or start-ups. In any case, if before that comment the cost of carrying out a test is not known, it is not being considered well.
- You know how to choose your battles wisely. Challenging HIPPO endlessly is a personal drain. Therefore, it is worth reflecting before entering into a discussion and considering whether it will affect the performance of the initiative. Probably not. In such a case you should not waste your time or make others waste to fight with each opinion.
3) The authority ends the debate. The cost of discussion does not produce knowledge. It is a wasteful activity. Analyzing results is not a debate, it is a useful activity. Why discuss opinions? It is pure waste.
Where does the ZEBRA come in?
At the end of the process and the wear and tear of and with the HIPPOs, the feared ZEBRA appear
While the Hi.PPO manifests itself through an authoritarian structure, the ZEBRA has the most fearsome weapon, arrogance. (the acronym is original from Emily Chuu).
ZEBRA is usually someone with "experience" who "really know the customer» (at least that's what he states publicly), but he doesn't have any data to back it up. Sometimes this is the product or commercial director or the CEO himself, or even user experience experts.
For example: "Based on years of design experience, we only know that the button should be red, the image should be smaller, and the button's shadow should be 4px (never 3px)."
It is much more dangerous than Hi.PPO because while Hi.PPO can be influenced by the facts, ZEBRA says: "The client is wrong."
The ZEBRA rules through the tyranny of experience.
The simple arguments or mantras that you should assume, in theory, to defend yourself against these two profiles would be:
Against Hi.PPOs: “I have made a decision. If you want to change the decision, bring me facts. Define an experiment that proves me wrong and I'll back it up, but the debate is over."
Versus ZEBRAs: "All opinions are equal in the absence of data."
A common management practice in ZEBRAs is the Gaviota management model
The corporate arrogance has even generated a very interesting book to be able to appreciate through the examples to what extent this ZEBRA position is pernicious for the organization.
