Secrecy Culture vs Privacy Culture: Why It Matters for Product Teams

There's a question I ask every product leader I work with: "Does your team know why decisions get made?"

Not whether they agree with the decisions. Whether they know why.

The answer reveals something important about organizational culture — and it usually falls into one of two categories. Either information is hidden because nobody thought to share it, or information is shared thoughtfully because the team decided what's useful to know.

The first is secrecy. The second is privacy. They look similar from the outside. They're fundamentally different on the inside.

The Difference That Matters

A secrecy-based culture withholds information by default. Decisions happen behind closed doors. Strategy is shared on a "need to know" basis. Roadmap rationale lives in the heads of two or three leaders. When someone asks "why are we building this?" the answer is "because leadership decided."

A privacy-based culture shares information by default and withholds by exception. Decisions are transparent. Strategy is documented. When information is withheld — compensation details, HR matters, pre-announcement partnerships — there's a clear, justifiable reason. And the team knows the reason even if they don't know the details.

The distinction: in a secrecy culture, the default is "you don't get to know." In a privacy culture, the default is "you get to know, unless there's a specific reason you don't."

Why Product Teams Suffer Under Secrecy

Product management requires context. Without it, PMs can't make good decisions — they can only execute orders.

When your team doesn't know the strategic rationale behind priorities, three things happen:

• Every decision becomes a bottleneck. If only leadership understands the "why," every tactical decision needs leadership approval. PMs can't make judgment calls because they don't have the context to make judgments. The team moves at the speed of the calendar, not the speed of the problem.
• Trust erodes. People fill information vacuums with assumptions — and those assumptions are almost always worse than reality. "Why did we deprioritize my team's project?" becomes "leadership doesn't value our work" instead of "a key customer contract changed the Q3 calculus." Secrecy breeds conspiracy theories.
• Good people leave. Experienced product leaders won't stay in environments where they're treated as executors. Product management is a decision-making function. If decisions are made elsewhere and PMs are just told what to build, you don't have product managers — you have project managers with inflated titles.

The Transparency Trap

Here's where it gets nuanced: the opposite of secrecy isn't radical transparency. It's thoughtful transparency.

"Radical transparency" sounds good in a manifesto. In practice, it creates new problems:

• Information overload. Sharing everything means nobody can filter for what matters. When every Slack channel has every decision, every document, every discussion — people stop reading. Information abundance becomes information noise.
• Decision paralysis. When everyone has input on everything, consensus becomes the default. Good strategy requires making clear decisions — and sometimes that means deciding without universal input.
• Performative sharing. Some organizations share information not because it's useful but because it signals openness. The all-hands meeting where leadership recaps what everyone already knows. The weekly email that nobody reads but everyone sends. Transparency theater.

Privacy culture avoids both extremes. It asks: "What does the team need to know to make good decisions?" and shares that. Not everything. Not nothing. The right things.

Building a Privacy Culture

Shifting from secrecy to privacy requires changing defaults, not just behaviors.

1. Make "why" the default

Every decision that affects the team should come with a reason. Not a justification — a reason. "We're deprioritizing Project X because Customer Y's contract change shifted Q3 revenue targets" is a reason. "We've decided to focus elsewhere" is secrecy wearing a professional tone.

This doesn't mean every decision needs a presentation. A sentence or two of context in the Slack message, the ticket, the meeting notes — that's sufficient. The point is that context is present by default, not available by request.

2. Define what's private and why

In a privacy culture, withholding information is the exception — and the exception is documented. "We can't share partnership details until the announcement date" is legitimate privacy. "Leadership is still discussing the strategy" for six months is secrecy.

Create a simple framework: what categories of information are private, and for how long? Compensation, HR matters, pre-announcement deals, board discussions — these have clear privacy reasons. Roadmap rationale, strategic priorities, customer insights, team performance — these don't. Share them.

3. Push context down, not decisions up

The hallmark of a secrecy culture is decisions flowing up and orders flowing down. The hallmark of a privacy culture is context flowing down and decisions being made where they belong.

When you share the strategic context — why your strategy exists, what constraints you're operating under, what trade-offs leadership made — PMs can make tactical decisions without escalation. They have enough context to exercise judgment.

That's not delegation. It's enabling. And it's the difference between a product team that leads and a product team that follows.

Signs You Have a Secrecy Problem

A quick diagnostic:

• When roadmap priorities change, does the team learn why — or just what?
• Can a PM on your team explain the company's top three strategic priorities and the reasoning behind them?
• When a project gets cut, does the team know what information drove the decision?
• Do people ask "why are we doing this?" frequently? That's a context deficit.
• Is "because leadership decided" an acceptable answer on your team?

If more than two of these ring true, you're operating in secrecy. The fix isn't sharing more — it's sharing the right things by default instead of by request.

Start Here

In your next team meeting, pick one recent decision and explain the full reasoning behind it. Not the outcome — the inputs. What information did you use? What alternatives did you consider? What trade-offs did you make?

Watch how your team responds. If they're surprised to learn the reasoning — if they say things like "I didn't know that" or "that makes more sense now" — you've found the gap between what you know and what your team knows.

Close that gap, and you won't just have a more informed team. You'll have a team that talks to each other and to customers with the context they need to make good decisions without waiting for permission.

Is your team operating on enough context?

Most product teams don't have a communication problem — they have a context problem. I help product leaders build information flows that enable decision-making at every level, not just the top.

Book a Clarity Call — 30 minutes, no pitch. Just clarity on whether secrecy is silently slowing your product team down.

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