Process people aren't the enemy, even when it feels like they are. I've learned this lesson twice - once by watching the right process transform a dysfunctional team, and once by nearly destroying my own career fighting the wrong battle. Both experiences taught me the same thing: you can't beat process people by going around them. You have to go through them.
When the Right Process Transformed a Team
I worked with an engineering-driven company where program managers drove their backlogs entirely by customer requests funneled directly through sales teams. Over time, this created what any experienced PM would expect: a product that was essentially a random assortment of features with no coherent strategy. Their process of talking only to the sales team for new features had to change, but they weren't going to listen to "some people in marketing."
So my boss worked with the leadership team to create a new cross-team council that included marketing, support, sales, business development, and design. This council brought more voices into the product decision process without eliminating the sales team's input entirely.
This was adding process, not removing it. But it was the right kind of process. It transformed our program managers into actual product managers by building relationships with key stakeholders and making more cohesive strategic decisions. An unexpected benefit was that salespeople started gaining access to our future direction, which helped them win deals based on our vision rather than feature checklists. It transformed our salespeople from feature checklist matchers into strategic consultants, which was incredible for business.
When I Fought Process and Nearly Lost
My personal awakening came during my transition from startup environments to a large Fortune 500 company. In small companies, I could make a plan, execute with my team, and learn from results. In the enterprise environment, this approach was completely wrong, and I learned this the hard way.
When I first started, I had big ideas and started rolling them out to my team. They shut me down almost immediately. I soon realized that to get anything done, I needed to write detailed PRDs, create business cases, and align stakeholders for support. At first, I fought it, trying to squeeze out value-adding work under the radar whenever possible. This was a terrible strategy that nearly derailed my career.
The process people saw what I was doing and were waiting for it to fail to demonstrate how important their frameworks were. It was surprising to discover how difficult they could make things for me when I tried to circumvent their systems.
So I tried a different approach. I started talking to them to understand what they really wanted. I explained what I was trying to achieve and asked for their advice. What I discovered was that people weren't as resistant as they appeared. They just wanted to feel like they mattered and that their processes were useful. So I gave them their pound of flesh. I wrote the documents, attended the meetings, and followed the approval workflows. The result was that I could actually get things done with much less resistance.
The Pattern
In both stories, the solution wasn't less process or more process. It was the right process. The cross-team council added structure that created better decisions. The Fortune 500 processes felt like bureaucracy, but they existed because a large organization needed alignment mechanisms I hadn't yet learned to appreciate.
The key insight is that strong principles beat heavy processes. "Always validate assumptions with customer feedback" is better than a 10-step customer research approval process. But principles still need some structure to work. The trick is finding the minimum amount of process that keeps everyone aligned without killing the team's ability to move.