A Practical guide to 🛠Build, 📈Scale & 🪴Nurture Product teams

13 min readDec 29, 2022

As a tech startup with a SaaS product, scaling your product team and building engineering excellence are crucial for driving growth and success. With a rapidly evolving market and increasing competition, it’s essential to have a team that is skilled, efficient, and agile.

However, scaling a product team while honing the engineering sensibilities can be challenging, especially in the world of startups where there’s incessant battle with constraints, limited resources, cut-throat competition, limited experience and endless passion. With all the chaos, emotions and huge energy around all the time, it becomes even more essential to start to organize and add structure when a startup transitions to growth or scaling stage. It become extremely important to have clear strategy and the right tools and processes in place to support(nurture) growth and ensure that the team is aligned and acts like a swarm with sharp focus

We’ll discuss the ways to scale your product team and nurture tech wisdom as a part of a SaaS Product team. We’ll cover everything from setting clear goals and priorities to fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement to investing in the right talent. By following these best practices, you’ll be well on your way to building a high-performing product team that is capable of driving success for your startup.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” — Sun Tsu, Ancient Chinese Military strategist

1. Define clear goals and priorities

One of the key ways to scale product development at low cost is to nurture your team mentally and to help them build capability to structure what is needed to be achieved. For this, it becomes extremely important to define clear goals, priorities, and mature review mechanism. Setting clear goals and priorities helps to ensure that the team is aligned and working towards the same objectives, which is essential for driving success. Having said that, to make steady progress, it’s important to review your goals and priorities on a regular basis to ensure that they remain relevant and aligned with your organization’s overall objectives.

But why is it important to review your goals and priorities more often? One key reason is that it helps to establish a sense of progress. When team members can see that they are making progress towards their goals, it can be highly motivating and help to build momentum. To converge your team as one force it’s important to maintain that context of progress and create spaces where they discuss progress which not only keeps the them subconsciously more proactive, focused and motivated, but also sometimes gives productivity boosts.

Another reason to review your goals and priorities more often is that it helps to ensure that the team has a clear understanding of the “big picture.” To progress well at the micro level (i.e., the specific tasks and initiatives that the team is working on), it’s essential to have a clear understanding of the macro level (i.e., the overall vision and direction of the startup). Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals can help team members understand what is expected of them and how their work fits into the overall product strategy.

One effective way to set goals, priorities, and holistic visibility is to use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). OKR is a goal setting system — simple tool to create alignment and engagement around measurable goals. OKRs involve setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound objectives and key results, which help to ensure that the team is working on the right things and making progress towards its goals.

In addition to using OKRs, there are several other best practices for defining and communicating goals and priorities:

Use agile methodologies: The art of continuous improving iterations, is a terrific way to evolve your Product and team. The choice to go for Agile depends a lot on what stage your startup is, because this might sometimes hinder overall momentum.
Conduct retrospective sessions: Retrospective sessions are a crucial part of agile methodologies, and they involve reflecting on the team’s progress and identifying areas for improvement. Helps you spot a lot of blind spots which go unattended as part of daily hustle.

Read More . . .

To explore more about OKRs, check A Practical guide to roll-out OKRs at Org Level, you’ll understand OKRs in more detail and will be able to implement it in your team or organization.

2. Foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement

In today’s fast-paced, fierce tech market, it’s essential to have a team that is skilled, adaptable, and always looking for ways to improve.

One way to foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement is to provide ongoing training and development opportunities for your team. The goal of training should be to spark curiosity and help team members apply skills to the real world.

In addition to providing training and development opportunities, it’s also important to create an environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas and asking questions. This majorly involves facilitating free flow of ideas, skills and knowledge. It’s critical to not create a sense of race inside the team. One way to do this is to make every person a mentor and mentee to two different people. This creates a flow of idea exchange where team members can share their knowledge and expertise with one another, without any inhibitions like ego or pride of knowing everything.

3. Implement efficient processes and tools

As your product team grows, it’s essential to implement efficient processes and leverage the right tools to improve efficiency and productivity.

To streamline your processes and improve efficiency, it’s important to carefully evaluate your current processes and tools and identify any bottlenecks or inefficiencies. This could involve analyzing your current workflow, identifying any manual or repetitive tasks that could be automated, and looking for ways to optimize your processes, probably every quarter or sometimes every month.

When choosing tools and processes, it’s important to keep in mind the long-term goals of your product. While it may be tempting to try out every new tool and process that comes along, it’s essential to be selective and choose only those that will have the greatest impact on your team’s performance. Startups often have limited resources, so it’s important to be strategic about which processes and tools you choose to implement. While it’s important to have some critical processes in place, it’s not necessary to maintain a lot of processes. The key is to find the right balance that works for your team and your startup.

4. Invest in the right talent

As a tech startup, it’s essential to invest in the right set of talent to build a high-performing product team which stays strong through all the ups and downs. After all, a good team shapes a good product. The emotions and values of a team are often captured as a part of the code they write, so it’s essential to have a team that is skilled, motivated, and aligned with the values of your startup.

When building your product team, it’s essential to look for individuals who have the passion, persistence, creativity, and ability to figure things out. These traits are extremely important for driving success in a startup environment, where things can be unpredictable and the pace of change is often rapid.

In addition to looking for these key traits, it’s sometimes also important to invest in not only people who are skilled and motivated, but are also passionate leaders at heart. Onboarding this breed helps organization in bringing psychological security, environment of support and creating a positive work culture that fosters growth, innovation, and collaboration.

Finally, it’s essential to invest in reevaluation of your current set of realities like processes, tech stack, solutions etc. In the world of tech building with simplicity over time is extremely crucial and to keep this a continuous ritual, people who can think at different levels in a situation and can take decision which are sometimes tactical and sometime strategic are really important.

In a startup, first 10 employees and first 5 customers sculpt your entire product and journey ahead.

5. Encourage innovation and risk-taking

Its essential to encourage innovation and risk-taking, to make scaling more sustainable. In today’s fast-paced, competitive tech market, it’s essential to have a team that is constantly looking for ways to improve and innovate.

One way to encourage innovation and risk-taking is to encourage your team to capture every vague idea that comes to their mind and schedule regular catch-up sessions to discuss and decide which ideas are worth taking a calculated risk with. This can help to aid a culture of continuous improvement and encourage team members to think creatively and outside the box.

Another way to cultivate a culture of innovation and risk-taking is to provide resources and support for team members to pursue new ideas. This could include things like dedicated time for exploration and experimentation, access to training and development opportunities, or funding for prototype development. By providing resources and support for team members to pursue new ideas, you can help encourage innovation and risk-taking within your team.

It’s also essential to encourage a “fail fast, learn fast” mentality within your team. This means encouraging team members to take calculated risks and experiment with new ideas, even if there is a risk of failure. By bringing a culture of learning from failures and using them as opportunities to improve, you can help your team become more agile and innovative.

6. Make your teams Antifragile

One key way to build strong product teams is to make your teams antifragile. Antifragile systems and entities are those that gain strength and resilience through exposure to stress, disorder, and volatility. They are the opposite of fragile systems, which break under stress and volatility.

The key principle of antifragility is the idea of stressors being beneficial in the right dose. Too little stress can lead to stagnation, while too much stress can lead to breaking. By finding the right balance of stress, you can help your team become stronger and more resilient.

Antifragility can be used to improve decision-making by considering the potential for unexpected outcomes and the benefits of embracing uncertainty. By embracing uncertainty and being open to the possibility of unexpected outcomes, you can help your team become more agile and adaptable.

Such systems often have built-in redundancy and adaptability, which allows them to withstand shocks and continue functioning. This could involve things like having multiple systems or processes in place to handle different situations, or building in flexibility and adaptability into your team’s workflow. With huge uncertainty, specific focus on achieving adaptability as part of your team becomes extremely crucial.

Such resilience driven systems have a decentralized structure, which allows for flexibility and adapt quicker. By decentralizing your team’s structure, you can help it become more agile and adaptable, which can be critical for success in a fast-paced, dynamic startup environment.

References

Nassim Nicholas Taleb endorses this concept quite well in his Book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Article by Ravi Mehta — How To Build Antifragile Companies

7. Build a strong feedback culture

It’s extremely important to build an unbiased, genuine and positive feedback system as a part of your culture. Such culture is one that is based on trust, transparency, and a focus on continuous improvement. It’s a culture where feedback from senior, peers, or even junior team members is seen as an opportunity to improve, rather than a threat.

To build a strong feedback culture, it’s important to establish strong foundation of two extremely critical and often significantly tough-to-achieve aspects — trust between all cross nodes of your team and transparency across all levels. This means creating an open and honest communication environment where team members feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas. It’s also essential to suppress culture of blaming or pointing fingers when things go wrong, and instead focus on finding solutions and continuously improving.

One of the best practices for implementing a feedback culture is to conduct candid & casual performance feedback more often than formal ones. Creating feedback sessions where people open, talk about their dreams, be vulnerable and also try to dream through the organizational goals is an extremely ideal way to look at it.

Executing sincerity and spontaneity in feedback as a part of your culture and value system is a part where leaders should focus more. This essentially means creating opportunities for team members to share their thoughts, ideas, and concerns, and actively listening to and considering their feedback. With such culture, many battles can be won (sometimes before they happen) and a lot of emotional stability can be achieved across the teams.

8. Sense of ownership and responsibility

When team members feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for their work, they are more likely to be energized, actively engaged, and committed to driving success for the organization.

A sense of ownership and responsibility could mean to provide opportunities for team members to take on leadership roles. This could involve giving team members the autonomy to lead projects, make decisions, and drive results. By providing these opportunities, you can help team members develop not just their leadership skills but also give them a sense of being in a driver’s seat and closer to tangible results.

Another way to strengthen a sense of ownership and responsibility is by giving people the freedom to take risks, make decisions, and be accountable for their actions. It’s important to remember that fear doesn’t work, and positive reinforcement is often more effective. By allowing team members to make new mistakes, you can help them feel empowered to take ownership of their work and drive success.

Embrace every failure. Own it, learn from it, and take full responsibility for making sure that next time, things will turn out differently. ~ Steve Jobs

Finally, it’s important to provide ongoing support and mentorship to help team members develop their skills and grow as professionals. This could include things like mentorship programs, training and development opportunities, or regular check-ins and feedback sessions. By providing ongoing support and mentorship, you can ensure that the weaker parts of the skills in the organization are elegantly patched without making the team feel guilty about it and your team can create wonders just by availability of support in critical areas and at right time.

9. Encourage diversity and inclusion

Building a diverse and inclusive team is essential for driving success in today’s tech industry, as it helps to bring a wide range of ideas, perspectives, and experiences to the table.

One way to promote diversity and inclusion is to implement diversity and inclusion initiatives within your organization. These initiatives could include things like implementing diversity hiring goals, offering training and development opportunities for underrepresented groups, or establishing employee resource groups. By implementing these initiatives, you can help create a more diverse and inclusive workplace culture.

Another way to look at diversity and inclusion might be to create a welcoming and inclusive inter & intra team culture. This means celebrating individualism and converting it to pluralism where all team members feel valued and respected for their own uniqueness and not comparison. It’s also important to acknowledge & respect diversity and recognize the value that different perspectives and experiences bring to your team.

This is probably one of the most underestimated aspect which can yield sustainable, long term and exponential results.

Amalgamation of chaos is unique and if you nourish it well it has value to offer

Conclusion

In conclusion, building, scaling, and nurturing product engineering teams is a critical part of driving success in the tech industry. To do so effectively, it’s important to consider not just the technical skills and expertise of team members, but also the human elements that make up a team. A team is built of people who are essentially humans, and every aspect of human behavior beyond skills is important when you build a product team.

There are different approaches to driving growth and success for a tech startup. One approach is sales-led growth, where the focus is on generating revenue through sales. Another approach is product-led growth, where the focus is on building a product that drives customer acquisition and retention. Finally, there is people-led growth, where the focus is on building a strong and high-performing team that drives success.

Ultimately, there is no right or wrong. There is just a rush of intent, energy, ideas and passion which needs to be channelize well.

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