The Drama Triangle vs. The Empowerment Dynamic

Within product teams, between product teams, and with stakeholders, there can be conflict. In the 1960’s, an American psychiatrist named Stephen Karpman mapped out three roles that people play in conflict. He created a model that illustrates destructive interaction, and called it the Drama Triangle. (Karpman loved the dramatic arts, and found these archetypes to be roles we play, or masks we put on, in conflict scenarios.)

The Hero

The Hero (also called the Rescuer) wants to save the day. But the action is often a quick fix that makes the problem go away, not a long-term solution. The Hero is motivated by wanting to be right. And this can result in acceptance and praise from others, but their heroics are limited in effectiveness and don’t address the underlying issues. Often a Hero might jump into the middle before knowing all of the facts, so a true solution wouldn’t be possible.

The Villain

The Villain (also called the Persecutor) wants to place blame. They want to figure out who is at fault and throw them under the bus. Occasionally they blame themselves, but more often they point the finger at someone else. Many times the blame goes to an undefined “they”, in the form of blaming “management” or “engineering”. When you are speaking with a Villian, it can often feel like gossip.

The Victim

The Victim is driven by fear. They pursue personal safety and security above all else. Victims can list many reasons why they are the real victim of a person, circumstance, or condition. “I was never trained on that”, “There’s not enough time”, “Nobody is helping”, “I’m not allowed to talk to customers”, etc. The Victim operates from a place of powerlessness and helplessness. Victims will seek help, creating a Hero to save the day, who often perpetuates the Victim's negative feelings and leaves the situation broadly unchanged.

Note: In this model, Victims are acting the part, they are not actually powerless/being abused. But accusing someone else of “playing the victim” and gaslighting them is a classic Villain move!

In 2009, a way to distrupt these interactions was published. David Emerald created The Empowerment Dynamic (TED*) which stops the reactive nature of the Drama Triangle and empowers new roles.

VICTIM > CREATOR

Victims stop thinking “poor me” and become Creators. Victims are reactive - focusing on scarcity, considering themselves powerless, and not seeing choices. Creators, however, claim their own power in a situation and focus on possibilities. Creators take responsibility and look for what they can do to alter a situation.

VILLIAN > CHALLENGER

The Villain stops blaming and becomes the Challenger. Where the Villain points finger about the present situation, Challengers bring new perspectives to others through positive pressure in a way that creates a breakthrough. The Challenger inspires and motivates, a kind of teacher who points the Creators opportunities for growth.

HERO > CoACH

The Hero stops trying to save the day and becomes the Coach. The Coach is a support role, helping others create the lives they want and evoking transformation. Heroes take over and micromanage. Coaches facilitate and encourage. A Coach leaves the power with the Creator, not taking it for themselves.

Shifting to the empowered roles instead of the sabotaging ones has to be a conscious move, but one that can be implemented within a team that has good trust and psychological safety. Conflict and tension will always be present to some degree, but we can better manage it and our reactions to it.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Present The Drama Triangle and Empowerment Dynamic to your team. Use this 3 minute video to help illustrate. Talk to your team about what roles they most often play, and in which scenarios. One person might always choose the same role, or they may play different roles based on the people or circumstances involved. How can your team support each other when they see the drama roles surfacing?

Signaling Decisiveness

As a product leader, you’re often navigating a space where formal authority doesn’t exist. Your influence is built through relationships and the respect you earn from your team, stakeholders, and peers. In this dynamic, how you carry yourself—what Sylvia Ann Hewlett describes as "gravitas" in Executive Presence 2.0—plays a significant role in how others perceive and respond to you.

Hewlett breaks gravitas into four essential components:

1. Projecting intellectual horsepower.

2. Displaying confidence and credibility.

3. Signaling decisiveness.

4. Maintaining grace under fire.

I’ve explored the topic of projecting intellect and expertise before, but we’ll focus on a less-discussed aspect of executive presence: decisiveness.

Decisiveness in Product Management

As product managers, we make decisions daily—about priorities, feature trade-offs, user experiments, and future research. These decisions shape the product’s trajectory and, in turn, the success of the business. To confidently communicate these choices to stakeholders, we must have self-assurance not only in our judgment but also in our ability to make those decisions quickly and effectively.

We’ve all experienced the pitfalls of indecision. When we delay making a choice, the situation often forces a default outcome upon us—typically not the one we’d have chosen. Avoiding this requires mastering the ability to make swift, informed decisions.

Gaining Confidence Through Information

One key to fast, confident decision-making is having access to trusted information that you can quickly digest and apply. Everyone processes information differently, so finding your ideal method for gathering insights is critical.

Some ways to gather the necessary information to confidently decide your product’s next steps:

1. Qualitative User Feedback – Mine your existing user feedback or lean on your UX team’s insights. Understanding the real-life experiences of your users is vital to making informed choices.

2. Internal or Quantitative Data – Build a strong intuition around user behavior by analyzing the numbers. Metrics often reveal truths that anecdotes can’t.

3. Experience with the Product – Use your own product like a customer would. Understanding the user experience firsthand gives you an invaluable perspective.

4. External Market Trends – Keep an eye on competitors, industry shifts, and broader consumer patterns. This will help you predict what’s coming and position your product accordingly.

5. Financial Modeling – Work with your finance or business partners to evaluate how various decisions might impact the bottom line. Long-term success often hinges on understanding the financial ripple effects of today’s choices.

6. Prototyping – Create mockups, sandboxes, or prototypes. Experimenting with different solutions can help you see how they perform in practice and make more informed choices.

While it’s impossible to cover all of these areas for every decision, pulling information from a few can lead to a decision that’s "good enough" to move forward.

The Role of Intuition and Circumstance

Of course, decision-making isn’t purely an intellectual exercise. As product managers, we juggle competing priorities, unpredictable constraints, stakeholder politics, and shifting business goals. Sometimes, our choices are influenced by factors beyond the data—like gut feeling or external pressures.

Even so, when you’re grounded in reliable information, you can navigate those complex variables with greater confidence. Decisiveness becomes less about bold assertions and more about informed, thoughtful action.

Leading with Influence, Not Authority

At the core of product management is the need to lead through influence. You don’t have the luxury of positional power; your authority comes from the expertise and trust you cultivate. Decisiveness is a key part of that influence. When your team and stakeholders see you making informed, timely decisions, it builds confidence in your leadership.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Discuss with your team how they typically make decisions, or how they might feel forced to make decisions. Of the methods discussed above, which ones are applicable to their learning style, the product, and the business. What other ways might they collect information to make better informed and quicker decisions?

Bonus: Learn about the framework of one-way door and two-way door decisions. Jeff Bezos explains the philosophy in this video.

Book Club: Transformed by Marty Cagan

At MillerKnoll I lead the Product Guild, a group of digital product folk from across the organization that meets at least twice a month in service of driving forward the adoption of a product-focused mindset across the enterprise. We support each other, developing and unifying our core competencies within product, and it is also an opportunity for me to harmonize everyone on prioritization, intake, roadmapping and best practices. This summer we did our first book club. While it might feel like a large guild is a better setting for this conversation, I encourage you to do this within your individual product teams - the discussion was illuminating.

Transformed: Moving to the Product Operating Model is the third in the series by Marty Cagan, but if you haven’t read any of them, you should make it your starting point. All of these books make for great professional book club fodder, as Cagan’s writing is very conversational and easy to consume, but also very structured. He tells you what he's going to tell you, tells you (including case studies) and then summarizes the key points. It is a perfect set-up for a group discussion.

Transformed teaches the reader how companies can move from their current approaches to the product operating model. It teaches the principles of the model, convinces you that it is possible, and inspires you to get there as an organization. This book particularly was written to appeal to those outside of Silicon Valley.

Transformation dimensions

• How you build - small releases, analytics, monitoring (product delivery)

• How you solve problems - assign problems to teams, let them find solutions (empowered product teams)

• How you decide which problems to solve - product leaders need a vision and insight-based strategy (product leadership)

Competencies

• Product Manager

• Product Designer

• Technical Lead

• Product Leaders

Product Model Concepts

• Product Teams - empowered with problems to solve, outcomes over output, sense of ownership, collaboration

• Product Vision - the power of an inspiring product vision, insights, transparency, placing bets

• Product Discovery - assessing product risks, embracing rapid experimentation, testing ideas responsibly

• Product Delivery - small, frequent, uncoupled releases, high-integrity commitments, instrumentation, monitoring, deployment infrastructure, managing technical debt

• Product Culture - principles over process, trust over control, innovation over predictability, learning over failure

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DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Where is our team and organization falling short in the three dimensions of the product operating model? Where is the most friction between this team and the organization?

2. In which areas have we become too rigid to the process and it is no longer serving us? How we should go back to our product operating model principles instead?

3. Which are the least relevant principles to us as an organization?

4. Do you think of the leaders of design and engineering as product leaders? More or less than the product management leader? Why or why not?

5. Have you previously used the technique of a high-integrity commitment?  Is this a possibility for the next time a stakeholder asks for a date?

6. Have you needed to address objections to the product model in the past? Was that successful? Do you think the scripts provided by the book will be helpful in future conversations?

7. What can you do in your role (individual contributor, manager, leader, etc) to forward the product operating model and transformation in our organization?

For more discussion questions, visit the SVPG site.

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As part of the Chicago product community, I was thrilled to be able to hear Marty Cagan speak last week at an event sponsored by Mind The Product. It was great to hear his candid and relatable answers to the crowd, and glean encouragement on how we can all make advancements, even as we work toward the large transformations. And I was able to fan-girl a little and get a selfie with Marty.

Using Games at Work

Games in a professional setting can bring in new mindsets or help tackle problems from a different perspective. Games within a product team are especially beneficial, as they both develop and capitalize on the psychological safety present.

A game is a structured form of play, usually undertaken for entertainment, fun, or educational purposes. Games can be physical (like sports), mental (like puzzles), or a combination of both (like board games or video games). They typically involve:

1. Rules: Clearly defined guidelines that dictate how the game is played and what players can or cannot do.

2. Objectives: Specific goals or outcomes that players aim to achieve.

3. Competition: Often includes competition between players or against the game itself.

4. Interactivity: Requires active participation from players, often involving decision-making and strategy.

5. Environment: A defined setting or context in which the game takes place.

6. Outcomes: Usually has a clear end condition or way to determine winners or losers.

In a professional setting, those elements are still present but morph a little. Using the work of academics like Johan Roos, Bart Victor, Michael Schrage, etc. who have written about the power of games in solving more challenging organizational problems, you might characterize a game as having:

• Purposeful Design: The game is designed with specific objectives in mind, such as improving teamwork, fostering innovation, or addressing specific organizational challenges.

• Rules and Structure: The game operates within a defined set of rules and a structured environment that guides participants' actions and interactions.

• Simulated Reality: The game creates a simulated environment that mirrors real-world challenges and scenarios, allowing participants to experiment and learn in a controlled setting.

• Engagement and Interaction: The game encourages active participation, collaboration, and interaction among players, promoting a deeper understanding of complex issues.

• Reflection and Learning: The game provides opportunities for reflection and learning, enabling participants to draw insights and apply them to their professional roles.

We play games all the time at work. Pretending is a game. Pretending to have more rules or structure than you normally do creates a game. “Run-throughs” of a presentation are literally pretending the event is happening, but it isn’t. Similarly, time-boxing is pretending there is a deadline when there isn’t.

Games allow different scenarios to be tested - whether in a true simulated reality game or just in a tabletop exercise. We also ask ourselves questions that prompt this kind of thinking: “How would we build this if budget wasn’t a factor?”; “If we could go after any market, where would we go?”; “If you were in charge here, what decision would you make?”

And of course a game allows a structured analysis or post-mortem that might not be available or would be too complex in the real work. The learnings through a game can be just as valuable as the real-world scenario. Many strategy games and simulations we use today have their origin in the military sphere. The defense sector uses strategy games and simulations to train hundreds of thousands of their troops.

By incorporating these elements, games in a professional setting can serve as effective tools for solving challenging organizational problems, fostering innovation, and enhancing overall performance.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

How can your product team incorporate play into their processes and solutioning? Start by auditing what you see at work - where are games already taking place? Then brainstorm how to expand that and apply it to your product team.

Team Health - Speed and Trust

In their book “Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems”, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss speak to the need of not only speed, but trust. Gone is the mantra of “move fact and break things” which wreaked havoc on people and teams. We can gain speed while maintaining trusting empowered teams. While the book is not about product teams specifically, all the lessons easily apply.

Frei and Morriss created a “FIX” map of Fast Iterative eXcellence. There are four potential trajectories for your product team.

The Four Quadrants

• Inevitable Decline
  - Diminishing stakeholder value
  - Transactional culture
  - High team member cynicism

• Responsible Stewardship
  - Oriented toward the past
  - Consensus decision-making
  - High team member comfort

• Reckless Disruption
  - High innovation
  - Stakeholder churn
  - "Us" and "them" thinking
  - High team member anxiety

• Accelerating Excellence
  - Rising stakeholder value
  - Balanced culture of creativity and achievement
  - High team member confidence and creativity 

While a team prioritizes work and builds roadmaps it can be useful to weigh these dimensions. Product teams should have a foundational level understanding of speed and trust. We need to treat pace and momentum as mission-critical, but also focus on gaining and keeping the trust of our cross-functional partners and stakeholders. In turn that trust can unlock speed. If all involved trust the plan, in an empowered team, everyone can execute that plan at an accelerated pace.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Create a FIX map and have your product team rate themselves. At first glance, where would you rate your product team? Are you moving fast or slow? Are you building or losing trust with your stakeholders? Don’t overthink it too much, just pick a quadrant and map your team to it.

If you land in the Accelerating Excellence section, great job. These teams are are creating high and rising value for stakeholders and users, and the folks in the team itself. You and your teammates are energized and delivering creative solutions.

If you are in Responsible Stewardship, you are missing the mark on your potential impact.

And Reckless Disruption is likely inflicting a lot of collateral damage in your sprint toward your goals.

Inevitable Decline doesn’t have the advantage of either trust or speed, and really needs some help.

For those not in accelerating excellence, think through how you knew where you landed. How do you understand the tradeoff of being in one of those three quadrants that is lacking? Maybe for those in responsible stewardship, you thought about how many processes any given thing has to go through and the fatigue that comes with that, or how you’ve lost talented colleagues and now can’t keep up. If you are in reckless disruption, maybe you are feeling how what you are delivering isn’t quite meeting user needs or is causing technical debt you can’t get away from. For those in inevitable decline, maybe it just feels bad to come into work some days, you’ve got some frustration and cynicism about your team or situation.

Knowing where the team rates itself provides two areas (trust and speed) to take a further look at and see where improvements can be made. Perhaps this is an exercise to revisit periodically as you work towards improved team health.