Why can’t we work together? A product culture journey
The most straightforward questions can often be the most complex to unravel. In my exploration of why team members won’t work together, I found it usually boils down to trust and understanding. I hope this article will help leaders coach product teams within their own companies.
The cultural storm
One of our first steps in building our product teams was to bring together team members with different disciplines. When we started this adventure six months ago, I shared my beliefs and examples with the team, reinforcing that we would create the best product by utilizing the diversity of our skills and experiences. We dedicate their time to a single product and agreed-upon key results. We then set cultural norms regarding empowerment, working publicly, and collaboration with the team.
I underestimated the challenges our team members would face adopting this way of working. When I asked team members to share their work early, often, and publicly, I was met with resistance. I found that team members were often frustrated due to distrust of this new process and anxiety that their competence would be judged from what they viewed as incomplete work. Team members conditioned to a transactional form of working struggle the most.
I’ll share when I’m done
In a traditional and transaction way of working, I’ve witnessed norms where a subject matter expert works on their task behind closed doors. This expert then pitches their polished work to other departments. This is very similar to how we’ve seen agencies work with clients. There are two shortcomings to this approach.
Shortcoming #1: A product based on your point of view alone
As brilliant as one team member may be, there is always a better chance of building a fantastic experience utilizing a team of minds. Working on a product yourself limits your potential to grow and learn from others. You are shutting yourself off from those magical moments where a team member shares a thought, and you ask yourself, “That’s amazing; why didn’t I think of that?”
Shortcoming #2: An overwhelming amount of feedback at the ‘end’
Too often, finished items are shared, and there is so much content that the team doesn’t spend the time required to assess the work for opportunities for improvement. When the product team does provide input on the content, the author is often overwhelmed and frustrated by the volume of information. The amount of rework ahead can also demotivate the author.
Share early and often
To avoid the challenges above and enable our product teams to develop outstanding products together, we coach the team to share early, publicly, and often. By sharing publicly, if a team member did not explicitly invite another team member to participate, that team member can still review, gain context, learn, and contribute. Sharing early and often enables an engaged team to provide input during the creation process. By sharing often, the team will minimize rework and allow the team to ship the highest quality product possible.
‘The road to working together
The path to a high-functioning product team is paved with listening, understanding, and coaching. Below are actions I’ve had success with in instilling the behaviors outlined above and overcoming the team’s resistance.
- Aligned leadership: Ensure the supporting leadership roles of each function understands and agrees with the culture we are trying to build. Validate that each leader is sharing and coaching the same message.
- Leave your ego at the door: Coach team members to share openly. Let them see firsthand the value that their team members can bring. Often, team members are afraid to share their work early. They may not feel safe and may have a fear of being judged. They may think that their team members can’t add value to their work. Through constant reinforcement, you can help them conquer these fears and misconceptions.
- Reinforce open communications: It’s common for team members to share their work through direct messages. This is a surprisingly tricky behavior to change. Ask your team members to help coach each other, reminding each other when they slip up and start conversations in direct messages with each other.
- Assume good intentions: Team members must assume that each other have these best intentions in their interactions. Especially with our remote work lifestyle, it’s easy to misinterpret communication from each other. Coach team members to build relationships and communicate directly to avoid misinterpretations.
I hope these tips and visuals were helpful. In my next article, I’ll share learnings around empowerment, decision making, and the misconceptions and conflict we faced with our collaborative way of working.
A bit about me:
I’ve started my journey by tumbling into product management from engineering a little under two years ago. I initially focused on helping teams determine what we need to build and why. I quickly realized that I needed to support the product teams with more fundamental skills. Teams needed to learn how to work together to deliver exceptional experiences. More importantly, they needed to learn how to appreciate each other’s perspectives.
None of these concepts are revolutionary. Marty Cagan covers many of these concepts in his books. I recommend Inspired and Empowered to all looking for a better understanding of product culture. I hope that by sharing my hands-on learning in coaching a non-digital native company to adopt a product culture mindset, leaders can use this material to help improve the lives of others in the workplace.
