You probably negotiate all the time without realizing it. And in today's episode, I want to give you a tool that I found incredibly useful in approaching a negotiation conversation. Now, if you don't think that you are a negotiator, I first need to convince you that you definitely are. You definitely are a negotiator. The things that you want in your life, you have to work for. And in that way, you are always negotiating. You are negotiating that the time that you spent on a given project was sufficient, or you're negotiating your salary. Maybe you're negotiating with a coworker over who should do which part of the project. The reason that most people don't think they are negotiators is because they don't feel like they're having to get something out of another person. Most of our negotiations, believe it or not, run pretty slowly. Smoothly. The negotiation of buying an item at a store doesn't necessarily change the price of the item. Negotiation doesn't have to mean haggling. So you are negotiating things. If you are choosing the way you are spending your time on a day-to-day basis, you are a negotiator. But where the rubber meets the road on negotiation is when you have disagreement. When you have a disagreement with another person, you are likely in a negotiation scenario. Think about it like this. You either agree to disagree and both sides walk away, or you are disagreeing for a reason. You're disagreeing because you want something different, or at least you think you want something different. And that's what we're talking about in today's episode. This illusion, the illusion that you are not on the same side. In almost every single negotiation that you have, eventually, you can get on the same side. Now, how is this possible? You may say, well, that's not necessarily true. The company that I'm applying to work at, they want to give me less money and I want more money. Of course, we aren't on the same side. Or, you know, I'm not on the same side. My child wants to stay up all hours of the night, and I can't convince them that sleep is better. We are not on the same side of this negotiation. Here is the tool that I want to give you today, because there is a frame. There is a zoom level. There is a perspective at which almost every negotiation has alignment. The employer that you are applying to, they probably want you to succeed so that they can succeed. There is some mutual benefit to be found. They don't want to pay you so little that you decide not to have the job. There is some mutual agreed upon benefit for both of you. The same is true. If you're not on the same side, you're not on the same side. You're trying to get your child to go to sleep. At some frame, they don't want to feel bad. And you don't want them to feel bad the next day either. And so while you may disagree in a zoomed in perspective that is about this specific subject, you do have alignment at some frame of reference. This comes into play when we start talking about timelines for projects at large companies, for example. You may have a highly technical refactor that you're hoping to push through the prioritization schemes of your company. And you may be fighting the difficulty of a product roadmap that's coming in front of your technical project. This is probably very familiar to a lot of you. So how do you find alignment on this? Well, at some level, if you were to zoom out and ask your product partner, do you want this product to be technically sound? They would say, of course. Of course we do. That kind of alignment is easy to find. But at some zoom level, at some vantage point, things break down. And so it's important to figure out where are things breaking down? Because the argument may... may be happening from two different vantage points. Think about this for a second. In a situation where you have a product partner who doesn't want you to do your technical refactor, it's not because they don't want the technical refactor to happen. It's because at that zoom level, at that particular vantage point, at the three week or the three month mark, they are more concerned with something else. And so what may be important to you at the three month mark is different for them at the three month mark. But zooming out to the three year mark, you find alignment. Again, think about this from the perspective of where is it along that kind of vantage point path or that zoom level. You can agree. You can agree. The negotiation then is not necessarily we should or should not do the. Refactor. But when? How do we align on getting the same things that we both want? You as an engineer, you don't want the product to fail either. And so when you use this tactic, it changes the conversation. It changes it from, I think product roadmap is more important than technical refactor to when can we make the technical refactor a priority? And this conversation is much more tenable. And it's. It starts from a place of alignment rather than a place of disagreement. The base philosophy here is that there are very few people who genuinely want bad things for other people. We generally want good things for other people. Sometimes we disagree on what is good. Sometimes we disagree on what is good. Sometimes we disagree on how to get there. But for the most part, humans want other humans to succeed. We want other humans to flourish. And so when we zoom out from our specifics of the problem and find that alignment and try to drive down to the first point where we diverge, then we start to understand each other better. Rather than starting from the base assumption. That you want something to be different for me than I want. Or you want something that's going to be detrimental to me as a human. We should instead start from the base assumption that we want each other to flourish. We want each other to succeed. Now this may seem philosophical and not practical. But it changes the tenor and the tone of your negotiations. When you truly believe that the other person is going to succeed. When you truly believe that the other person has an overall best interest in mind for you. Then you can find the problems and solve them. Rather than fighting the person. Negotiation, in the best case, is about solving problems. Not convincing people. When you can solve problems in negotiation. Then both sides can come out on top. Rather than one side winning. When you look at a negotiation as a person versus a person. Then one person inevitably ends up failing or losing in the negotiation over the other. But a great negotiation occurs when both people bring their problems to the table. And then they solve them together. This perspective requires that you reject the zero-sum kind of base assumption. That every negotiation is zero-sum. In other words, we have X number of points of value that we're trying to negotiate between the two of us. And I'm trying to get the most X points. And you're also trying to get the most X points. And we walk away with a net total that was the same that we walked in with. There is no conservation of value in a good negotiation. Both sides can come out on top. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoyed this discussion. And hopefully this got your wheels turning a little bit about one. The fact that you probably are negotiating way more often than you think you are. And two, the idea that most of the time you can find alignment at some vantage point. And the exercise to do in good negotiation is to find that vantage point. And then solve problems. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea. Thank you.