Review: The Tech Trifecta — Building together as a product development team
Hiya, watsup! Weiyuan here from Big O(n) Development!
Let’s cover another interesting episode of Small Talk, that happened on the 17th February 2024!
This time, we have a very interesting topic — Building a Product Development Team — and what matters on this from the perspective of a Product Manager, UX Designer, and Software Engineer.
Let’s gooooo!
Summary
In this episode, we covered 2 questions — “What do you think is key to a good product development team?”, and “What should then be avoided for a product development team to operate well?”
Trust
Starting off the discussion, I talked about how much I appreciated other Product Managers, Designers, and even Software Engineers who put in the work to build trust, quoting the formula from “The Speed of Trust”, where “Trust = fx(Integrity, Competency)”.
Stephanie and Shirley built on the theme of trust through achieving alignment, such as the alignment of outcomes to solve for, as well as the experiences we are delivering for the end-user.
There were some great anecdotes here by my guests. Such as stories and tips for building alignment. One-on-ones are the standard, but also participating in events like working runs to build relationships!
More importantly, as a product manager, helping to shape up and share the strategic objectives with the team, helping to drive better product development outcomes, as well as serve as a point of motivation for invested team members.
One interesting discussion point to note was that we also converged on the usefulness of a “project manager”. Anyone who’s taking up the role of “project manager”, whether it is a TPM, product, design, engineer, or anyone else, holds a crucial role in driving alignment from the start, til the point of driving results.
Squads, and also silos
It was also intriguing to learn from my guest about her experiences with squads and chapters. We learned how Stephanie works within “squads” that are segregated by user flows in Endowus, creating subject matter experts from engineering + design + product, and again interesting stories such as “losing” team members that move between squads 😆
The antithesis of squads is a “silo”, a concept of a team where knowledge and context are locked behind a person or the team from other people in the company, whether intentionally or not. Avoiding the formation of silos, such as through documentation and knowledge sharing, are important points to look at!
Anyway, you can search more about Spotify and various companies’ experiences with squads online!
This was a really fun episode! Did the above summary get you excited? 😄
Catch the whole episode here:
