5 things of successful products: Team Management (Part 1)

In this part we will try to uncover “team” value

Hi! In this articles I will try to cover some tools and practics to be successful in product and project management process. This is written for a new and experienced Project and Product Managers, Scrum Masters and Team Leaders, who love what they do and want to change something or just spent a 5 min of life :)

It is a 1 of 5 posts about successful product, where I will describe team values that PM need to control and manage first.

Table of content

1. Team
2. Manager
3. Work Process
4. Product
5. Client

Team: Be a part of it and stay independent

Team management plays important role in successful product. All of us has read a ton of posts and articles about successful team or “dreamteam” building, but let’s try to be clear: team always starts from you.

Main values of the team that you need concentrate on:

• Respect & Trust. You need to understand that you try to make a team of experienced developers and designers, who loves what they do and who cares about your opinion. On the project development stages, try to keep a respect from more experienced team members (developers). Be in touch of they issues, show that you trust them and that you listen them. Show your respect and they will respect you (read more about communications, relationships building and psychology aspects of team-building).

Just trust them.

• Involvement. If your team are not involved in the project — try to fix this with some interesting actions like fun games or competitions. Kanban board challenge in this case are really helpful (if you remember Silicon Valley serial, where Jared do the same trick with Gilfoyle and Dinesh). Try to explain them all project sides, project value to the end user and client. They need to know what is the main goal of this product, how users will use it and how client will sell this on , market. Make the common meeting with all sides of project development process (client, team, PO, stakeholders, BDM etc.) to explain all of them about project idea. And do this again and again, until all participants understand this.

• Workplace. Ask your team about satisfaction of workplace. It’s can be a small additionals, like cup with Star Wars print or new pen or pencil. Small gifts make people happy. Off course, first you need to ask HR about budget or hint him about this. Make workplace — second home for your team. It’s will be a place, where they can work productively, but on other side — meet and talking together, enjoy funny stories and have a mind rest. Team members need to know that they can ask you everything about work, project or something private anytime.

• Analize. Do not forget that it’s a young people who loves to do something crazy or just f*ck up. Show your trust to the team, but still track with they efficiency metrics. You can make a project log with Jira reports about resolved/unresolved issues, or make it in Google Spreadsheets. Use your meetings notes for checking whos from your team more active and provide more decisions than questions, etc. Based on this statistics you can do some “S.W.O.T.” analysis and help them to increase their weaknesses.

Quality S.W.O.T. from the heart.

• Responsibilities. For quality workflow, explain and assign all tasks by right responsible person. Example: Who need to make a user story acceptance criteria? QA? Designer? Client? Product Owner? All of your project team. But, here we have one correction: not everyone should be involved in the same sense. Check how to work with RACI Matrix of responsibilities (you can use some templates of Resource Planning from my previous post).

• Motivation. Every team member is unique and must be motivated individually. Team motivational it’s HR’s work, but you need to know how to motivate them on the mental level or something that HR doesnt know about. Help them to choose tech stack, provide an opportunity to learn new frameworks or code libraries on GitHub. Try to make everyday work on project more interesting, add a new challenges, discuss about changes or product improvements.

This guy know about motivation.

Thank you for your time, I hope it was a useful information and you will use something of this tips. See ya in the next post about “Manager”.

P.S.: It’s my first blog post, that I had wrote by myself. I would like to thank you, if you give me your short feedback in comments :)

Check some useful templates for Product Documentation on all development stages in my previous post:

Useful excel templates of Project Documentation