Interests vs positions negotiation example: unsticking a two-team standoff over scope and timeline

Two teams can be completely stuck on positions while wanting things that fit together, and they often miss it. Leigh Thompson and Dennis Hrebec's 1996 meta-analytic review of 32 experiments in Psychological Bulletin documented how common this is: their abstract notes that people with compatible interests "often fail to realize this and settle on an outcome less favorable to both parties than another readily available solution." The authors call it the lose-lose effect.

The fix is old and well tested. Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton's Getting to Yes, as the Harvard Program on Negotiation summarises in its explainer on principled negotiation, asks negotiators to look under each stated demand: "Positions are surface-level statements." What follows is one worked dispute between two product teams, taken from position to signed package, with a blank table at the end to run the same procedure on your own standoff.

What does a positional standoff between two product teams look like?

Basketfern is a fictional online grocery service. Every number below is illustrative. You are the PM on its Loyalty team. Your team's key result this quarter is to raise the share of active loyalty members who redeem points from 3 to 12 percent, and marketing has booked a spring campaign for 15 April with the message that points are now worth money at checkout.

The Checkout team is in the middle of moving to a new payment provider. The old provider's contract ends on 30 June, the migration is planned to finish on 30 May, and the team has frozen the checkout flow until then.

Two weeks of meetings have produced two positions and nothing else:

• Loyalty: "Points redemption has to be in checkout, with the full rewards catalogue of 14 reward types, live on 15 April."
• Checkout: "No changes to checkout until the migration is done on 30 May. The flow is frozen."

Stated that way, one team has to lose. Either the campaign launches without redemption or the freeze breaks. The Harvard Program on Negotiation's six guidelines for getting to yes put the problem in one line: "But positions tend to lock people into corners."

How do you find the interest behind each position?

Ask questions until each position turns into the thing it protects, then check every answer against evidence. The same guidelines suggest three questions that work well in a product dispute: "Why is this important to you?", "What problem are you trying to solve?" and "What concerns would need addressing for progress?" Ask them of your own team first. The interests you are least comfortable writing down are usually the ones driving the position.

Team	Position	Interest underneath	Evidence
Loyalty	Redemption in checkout on 15 April	Members can spend points from the first day of the campaign, or the campaign's message is false	Campaign brief and booked media dates
Loyalty	Full catalogue of 14 rewards	Redemption rate high enough to hit 12 percent	Pilot data: 81 percent of redemptions were "points off your order"
Loyalty	(unstated)	Not being the team marketing blames for a weak campaign	Last year's launch review
Checkout	Freeze until 30 May	Migration finished with a month's buffer before the old contract ends	Provider contract end date, 30 June
Checkout	Freeze until 30 May	Checkout conversion does not drop during the migration	Conversion is the team's own key result
Checkout	Freeze until 30 May	If conversion moves, the team can tell which change caused it	A previous incident where two releases overlapped and nobody could attribute a drop
Checkout	(unstated)	The same five engineers are not carrying two risky changes on call at once	On-call rota

Two things change once the table exists. The full catalogue turns out not to be an interest at all: 81 percent of pilot redemptions used one reward type, so the other 13 are a preference, not a need. And Checkout's freeze turns out to be protecting attribution and on-call load, not the checkout code as such. A change that does not touch the checkout flow does not threaten any of Checkout's interests.

For the conversation itself, the mirroring and labeling moves in tactical empathy for product managers are the quickest way to get the unstated rows said out loud.

What is the one sentence both teams would sign?

Write a single sentence that states both teams' core interests together, and get each lead to agree to it before anyone discusses options. If they will not sign it, you have the wrong interests in the table.

For Basketfern: "Loyalty members can spend points from the first day of the spring campaign, and checkout conversion and the payment migration stay on track."

The sentence does real work later. Every option gets tested against it, and either lead can use it to stop a meeting drifting back to positions: "Does this keep migration on track? Then it is not the freeze we are discussing."

Which tradeables cost one team little and matter a lot to the other?

List everything either team could give, then price each item twice: what it costs the team giving it, and what it is worth to the team receiving it. The items worth keeping are the lopsided ones. This is the step the Harvard Program on Negotiation calls inventing options for mutual gain, and its principled negotiation explainer asks for "deliberate creativity before commitment": brainstorm several options, suspend judgement while generating them, and look for trades across issues.

Tradeable	Given by	Cost to the giver	Value to the receiver
Launch with "points off your order" only, not 14 rewards	Loyalty	Low: 81 percent of pilot redemptions	High: one price-adjustment path for Checkout to reason about
Redeem as a single-use voucher code from the rewards page, applied through the existing promo-code field	Loyalty	Medium: one extra step for members	High: no change to the checkout flow before 30 May
Open the basket with the voucher already applied, using the promo link format checkout already supports	Checkout	Very low: existing behaviour, no new code	High: removes the extra step for members
Reserve a slot for native redemption in the order summary Checkout is rebuilding for the migration, behind a flag, in June	Checkout	Low: the component is being rebuilt anyway	High: a real date for the in-checkout experience
Hold back 10 percent of members from redemption for the first 4 weeks	Loyalty	Low: redemption delayed for a small group	High: Checkout can attribute any conversion change cleanly
Split the campaign: "earn" message on 15 April, "spend in one tap" message when native redemption lands	Loyalty and marketing	Medium: a second campaign wave to plan	Medium: a second moment for the loyalty programme

The third row is the kind of item that ends standoffs. It cost Checkout nothing, nobody had thought to ask for it, and it removed Loyalty's main objection to the voucher route. Tradeables like it only appear when someone asks what the other side could give cheaply rather than what they should concede.

How do you test packages against every team's interests?

Assemble three complete packages, each covering scope, timeline and a measurement rule, then score each one against every interest in the table. Three is the minimum: one option gets a yes or no, two get split down the middle.

• Package A, voucher bridge. 15 April launch with "points off your order" only. Members redeem from the rewards page, which opens the basket with the voucher applied. A 10 percent holdout runs for 4 weeks. Native redemption ships in the rebuilt order summary, behind a flag, in June.
• Package B, flagged native soft launch. Native redemption built into the current checkout, behind a flag, for 5 percent of members on 15 April, scaled after the migration.
• Package C, earn now, spend in June. The campaign launches on 15 April around earning double points; redemption opens natively in June after the migration.

Interest	Package A	Package B	Package C
Members spend points from campaign day one	Met	Partly (5 percent of members)	Not met
Redemption rate reaches 12 percent	Partly (voucher step may cost some redemptions)	Not met (audience too small)	Partly (redemption starts in June)
Loyalty not blamed for a weak campaign	Met	Partly	Partly
Migration finished by 30 May	Met	Not met (engineers build code for a checkout being replaced)	Met
Conversion protected	Met	Partly	Met
Changes attributable	Met (holdout, no flow change)	Not met (two changes in checkout at once)	Met
On-call load not doubled	Met	Not met	Met

Package A meets six of the seven interests and partly meets the seventh. Package B, the obvious "compromise" of building a little of everything, is the worst option on the table: it fails four of Checkout's interests and does not deliver Loyalty's either. Splitting the difference between two positions usually produces a package like B, which is why the interests table comes before any proposal.

How do objective criteria settle the arguments that remain?

Agree the measurement rule before launch, so the next disagreement is settled by a number both teams chose, not by whoever argues hardest. The Harvard Program on Negotiation's article on resolving disagreements with principled negotiation quotes the Getting to Yes authors: the more you bring standards of fairness, efficiency or scientific merit to a problem, "the more likely you are to produce a final package that is wise and fair."

Basketfern's standard: if checkout conversion for members who see redemption falls more than 0.3 percentage points below the holdout group over any 7-day window, the voucher link pauses automatically and both PMs review within one working day. Loyalty agreed to it because it protected the launch from being pulled on a hunch. Checkout agreed because it gave the team an exit it controlled.

What does the written agreement say?

Five short paragraphs, sent by the Loyalty PM to both teams and both managers the same day:

What we agreed. Spring campaign launches on 15 April with "points off your order" redemption from the rewards page. The basket opens with the voucher applied. No change to the checkout flow before 30 May.

Loyalty commits to launching with one reward type, running a 10 percent holdout for 4 weeks, and moving the "spend in one tap" message to the June campaign wave.

Checkout commits to supporting the voucher link format from 1 April, and shipping native redemption in the rebuilt order summary, behind a flag, by 20 June.

Rollback rule. If conversion for the redemption group falls more than 0.3 points below the holdout over any 7 days, the voucher link pauses and both PMs review within one working day.

Review. Both teams review redemption and conversion together on 13 May, and confirm or change the June date then.

When do interests vs positions not unstick a standoff?

When the interests genuinely collide. If Checkout's migration had needed every engineer on the voucher path's code, or the campaign had promised a reward type only checkout could deliver, no package would meet both interests and more brainstorming would only delay the decision. Then the honest move is to compare each team's fallback, the BATNA for each side, and send the decision to the person who owns both teams' goals, with this interests table attached so they decide on the real stakes. When the collision is over people rather than scope, how to prioritize between two teams competing for the same engineers covers the capacity version of that decision.

There is a second limit, closer to home. As one of the parties, you will be tempted to write the other team's interests sharply and your own generously. The unstated rows in the table above (credibility with marketing, on-call load) were the ones that mattered most, and both had to be said out loud by the team that held them. If you cannot get your own team's unstated interest into the table, ask a neutral peer to run the session.

What does the blank interests table look like?

Copy this into your doc before the next standoff meeting. Fill your own team's rows first.

Team	Position (their words)	Interest underneath	Question that surfaced it	Evidence	What they could give cheaply	What they would value most

Then write the sentence both teams would sign, build at least three packages, score each against every interest row, and agree the objective standard before anything ships. For a single stakeholder and a single deadline, the narrower version of this procedure is in how to negotiate deadlines and scope. To rehearse the objections before a multi-team meeting, AI for meeting prep shows how to build an objection table for everyone in the room.

Where can you practise cross-team negotiation?

Negotiation for Product Managers is a one-week Builders Camp bootcamp with 2 live sessions and 9 microlessons, part of both the Product Management Starter Track and the Product Leadership Track. Its published topics include negotiation in cross-functional teams (aligning incentives between product, design, engineering, sales and leadership), framing that shifts conversations from positions to outcomes, and trade-offs and concessions. Its practical challenge is a three-team standoff over scope, timeline and priorities, with a different product and different stakes from the example here.

Builders Camp runs live and self-paced bootcamps in product management and AI product building. See the Negotiation for Product Managers bootcamp for dates and format.