A practical guide to building empowered Product teams

Data Scientists, Tom and Andrew, reflect on a recent experience to showcase the necessary factors.

In 2019, we made an intentional change to how we build our product at Aire.

By embracing a ‘problems to solve’ mentality as opposed to a ‘features to build’ approach, we’ve built a structure that empowers our people to deeply understand the ecosystem in which we operate. With this in place, they are better able to discover and build product features that serve our customers best. Tom and Andrew explain…

Defer to your culture

Andrew: A feeling of safety is key. It starts with our interactions with each other: being respectful, making sure you are giving people the opportunity to speak and to challenge. These are micro-behaviours that happen every day, but that are vital to the healthy running of the team.

Tom: For me, our treatment of each other is a critical foundation to the autonomy we have as a team. Aire has an important company culture but it is ultimately up to us to embody that. It is our choice on a day-to-day basis to be respectful and helpful to each other. We recognise it easily when we see it which reinforces that behaviour across the team.

‘Giving credit to people when they’re not in the room is something, as Aire’s Agile Coach, I often observe. Ideas being built upon and people being referenced alongside them all help to add to this feeling of empowerment and autonomy within each team.’

Meena, Agile Coach

Focus on the outcomes for your customer

Tom: We have a singular determination to get to a place where each of us within the team understands their responsibility towards our OKRs. By everyone buying into this, the making of lower-level decisions becomes more autonomous as they are then made with a clear understanding of the purpose behind them.

Andrew: Marty Cagan talks about the importance of connecting everyone with the bigger picture (for example: engineers participating in product discovery work). We get a lot of comfort in our work through a real understanding of the context behind it, not just the delivery of outputs.

It’s important to me that I can chart a direct line between the value I deliver and the work the company has prioritised within the quarter. It’s not easy to do — businesses must build the framework and the time for this to be properly understood in order to reach that. And of course, at Aire we’re still learning!

Respond rapidly to change

Andrew: When something changes, gaining a fast understanding of the detail of the problem at hand is critical. Will it have an impact on our product? If so, to what extent? And what, therefore, do we think needs to be done in response?

A recent example of this is a change that came in the form of updates from the UK government to the Covid-19 furlough scheme — which, in turn had the potential to impact the consumer modelling in our product, Pulse. With our company mission focused on delivering fairness for consumers top of mind, we monitored the situation closely. The team agreed that action had to be taken.

We decided to have a time-boxed investigation to understand more. A set of recommendations were shared so that everyone had visibility of the information required to make a more informed choice. By truly owning the problem of accurately representing the situation of consumers, we were empowered to take action straight away — something we might have struggled to do if we worked as a more traditional, feature-focussed team.

Tom: By prioritising a short investigation to understand the impact we were able to adjust our focus without destabilising current workflow. The dynamic was effective. It allowed for everyone to feel a sense of ownership, allowing a decision to be made collectively as to the correct course of action. With this shared understanding, there was an increased ability for everyone to speak up and say whether they believed the recommended action was a good idea.

Delivering real value

Andrew: With the correct research and understanding in place, the team was able to find a solution and deliver that outcome quickly. We could be confident that the changes in place would better serve our customers as they’d been made with a detailed understanding of the problem at hand, by everyone and from the very start.

Thank you, Tom and Andrew!

Interested to learn more about Product at Aire? Here we discuss Product alignment — the Aire way.