Unlocking High Performance: A Guide to Cultivating Your Dream Team

Essential Components for Team Success

Mar 23, 2024

We discussed how to measure product and process success in the past two weeks' newsletters. Yet, we recognize that it's people who build the product and shape the processes. Product management is a team sport, where a team's performance determines the outcomes of product discovery and delivery. While product and process key metrics serve as lagging indicators, team performance acts as a leading indicator. However, measuring team performance isn't straightforward. Firstly, team members differ in value, personality, and capability. Secondly, teams constantly evolve through various stages.

So where do we begin? How about treating our product team members as customers, understanding their needs, wants, and desires?

"I like to think about the reward centers in the PM brain. There's several big ones I can think of: having impact, delighting users, sense of purpose/mission, having autonomy, getting recognition, financial outcomes, learning/growth, etc. In my experience, more than other disciplines, PMs tend to care most about impact and autonomy." — Todd Jackson | former VP of Product at Dropbox

By crafting a compelling product vision, clarifying autonomy boundaries, supporting the team through thick and thin, and allowing them to shine in their areas of expertise, things start to happen. Perhaps, qualitative measurements in areas like vision, strategy, values, rules, goals, roles, and processes could gauge team performance effectively.

1. Vision and Strategy

The vision and strategy address the WHY, the north star of a team.

A product vision and strategy are more than just catchy slogans. They give the team overall direction and a common understanding of their goals. It's like opening a box of a big puzzle with hundreds of pieces—each team member finds their piece of the small picture, but everyone must see the big picture and coordinate to solve it. A product vision comes alive when everyone sees their contribution making a difference to the overall product vision.

Now, when it comes to measurement, ask yourself these questions:

New product vision and strategy: How do we come up with the vision and strategy? Who has been involved? Invest time to craft and get buy-in. The process is a two-way street; leaders and teams work together to paint a big picture.
Existing product vision and strategy: Does everyone in your team know what your product vision and strategy are? As the team grows, product leaders have to communicate the vision and strategy often in different ways and perspectives. Repeat until it becomes ingrained.
In execution: Does everyone work on their small picture each day with the big picture in mind? Coach the team to examine and stay focused. Learn to say no to things that don’t fit into the big picture.

When we buy in, share, and focus on the big feature—the product vision and strategy—the stakeholders are on the same page to make decisions more efficiently, building products faster and better.

By the way, I've discussed many execution issues caused by unclear product vision, strategy in a separate newsletter before. If you'd like to know how to create a good product vision and strategy, you can also check it out this blog.

2. Value and Rules

A self-directed team is the most efficient in a consistently changing environment. In the book “Empowerment Takes More Than Minutes,” author Ken Blanchard emphasizes that one of the keys to creating autonomy is to set up boundaries. The boundary is like the banks of a river. Without it, the water floods wherever it goes, causing lots of damage. The value and ground rules are part of the building blocks of boundaries.

Each team should invest time to come up with its own ground rules. There are several universal ones:

Trust: Trust is the foundation for teamwork. How do we earn trust? First of all, by communicating openly and being transparent—sharing project status, business performance, challenges, and customer feedback. Putting real-time dashboards out and openly talking about mistakes and lessons learned. Only informed team members can make the right decisions and act decisively. Secondly, by fostering a psychologically safe environment where the team feels safe to speak out. No one has to cover up bad news, and everyone is more willing to take risks knowing they could fail safely.

Collaboration: Product managers depend on engineers, designers, GTM teams. Team members must be able to count on one another. Collaboration means leveraging people’s collective expertise and securing their buy-in. It means understanding other people’s feelings and needs, taking the perspective of another person even if you disagree. It means effectively practicing active listening and offering honest but constructive feedback. It also means successfully addressing disagreements, resolving conflicts, and maintaining productive relationships for the common good.

Customer-centric: It involves putting the customer at the heart of all we do—product functions, user experience design, and customer support. Digital products require ongoing customer discovery. Regular meetings with willing customers bring invaluable feedback and insights, minimizing decisions made without user input.

Ask yourself these questions:

Has information been shared timely and transparently in the team, across functions? Encourage bad news to travel quickly, don’t kill the messenger.
Do the team members have good people skills? Do they need to be trained to conduct meetings effectively, listen with empathy, manage conflicts? Assess at the individual level and provide a personalized development plan.
Do we listen to customers directly each week? And translate their inputs into new features, enhancements, prioritization? Set up recurring meetings and invite new and existing clients to join.

3. Team, Goals and Roles

Another boundary is team structure, and members’ goals and roles.

When a new product starts, usually one product manager sits with three to four engineers in the same open area. Communication happens in real-time, and things move forward fast. However, when a product team scales to 40+ people, organizing them without causing chaos is a real challenge. There are various best practices from different companies that you can refer to in order to create a structure that fits the team members and company situation.

Amazon keeps the teams to no more than what could be fed by 2 pizzas as communication overhead scales poorly after ~6 people.
The Squad model, where Spotify broke existing Scrum processes and reinvented what it meant to be agile for their organization.
Amplitude defines Pods as small autonomous groups of people defined by their common objective and measure of success.

After the team is organized, clarifying goals and roles and holding people accountable is important.

Establishing well-defined goals and roles is crucial for holding individuals accountable for their results. There are good frameworks like SMART goal setting and RACI worksheets you can take advantage of.
Accountability goes both ways for leaders and members. Ensure leaders are held accountable for their actions, and members too. Leaders are also responsible for removing hurdles for the team, especially external ones that are out of the team’s direct control.
Regularly monitoring progress and providing constructive feedback helps individuals stay on track and improve their performance.
Creating a work environment where accountability is valued and promoting and championing individuals who take ownership and deliver is essential.

Ask yourself these questions:

Is the team organized around customer needs? Keep the team small, diversified, and organize around personas.
Are each team member clear on his or her goals and roles? Clarify and hold everyone accountable for results.
Is performance feedback happening and conducted in constructive ways? Treat team members as people, not objects.

4. Repeatable processes

Implementing standardized repeatable processes streamlines operations and preserves institutional knowledge for best practice. The processes are included but limited to:

How to interview customers
How to run annual planning, QBR, MBR meetings
How to run standups, sprint planning, grooming, sprint review, retrospectives
How to test and deploy code
What is the checklist before product launch
How to provide production issue resolution support

Ask yourself these questions:

Have we trained team members on essential processes - how to conduct interviews, meetings, write minutes, prioritize features?
Have we created repeatable processes for ongoing activities such as product launch or issue resolution?
Have we provided templates for standardized documents like stories, MBR, QBR dashboards?

5. Start the journey

Even after you've crafted a clear vision and strategy, setting up good boundaries, making an autonomous team work is a bumpy ride. There are some frameworks and tools you may need along the way.

Know your team’s lifecycle stage and pay attention to challenges in each stage.

Mr. Bruce Tuckman defined a team development lifecycle with four stages: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing in 1965. Each stage has its own challenges and activities to carry out. You can find more here. Just to point out, ground rules are likely established in the forming stage, but it is best to rewrite them in the Norming stage. In this stage, people are more willing to think from a team perspective rather than an individual perspective. Also, be aware that the team lifecycle is not always in linear progress; when new team members are added or leave, the team may regress to an earlier stage.

Know your team members as people.

For a new or rapidly growing team, introducing team members to behavioral models may help overcome this problem and drive a better understanding of each other's behavioral tendencies. One commonly used model is by Dr. William Marston. The DiSC model states that everyone has a dominant behavioral style, and understanding each other’s styles helps team members interact more positively.

Know how to fix a dysfunctional team.

Lencioni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team has a good framework. It provides a team assessment exercise to help identify areas of team dysfunction and offers insights into how a team can overcome these dysfunctions. The five dysfunctions covered in the book are: Absence of trust, Fear of conflict, Lack of commitment, Avoidance of accountability, and Inattention to results.

Conclusion

Building a high-performing product team is all about empowering a passionate and autonomous unit.

We unpacked the importance of a shared vision and goals, acting as the north star that motivates and keeps everyone rowing in the same direction. We then delved into establishing core values and principles. Fostering trust through open communication is the prerequisite. The team organization can be different but aiming for small, cross-functional units designed around customer personas. Each team member understands his or her small picture and how it fits into the large picture. Finally, remember that teams go through a lifecycle. By nurturing the team through these stages, you'll cultivate high performance quicker.

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