Improve Your Product Team’s Combat Effectiveness (Part 2)

The last article focused on practices to help a product team become greater than a sum of its parts. This article covers the dynamics outside a team that can cripple combat effectiveness (regardless of how well a product manager runs the team).

Issue 1: Your team doesn’t have the ability to make or act on product decisions by itself

Many product teams are doomed to fail before they start. As a product manager, you are responsible for exercising diplomacy within the organization to make sure your team has the abilities to:

• Clearly define success: You will need a meaningful mission, clear goals, measurable results, and alignment with the organization’s direction. Your team will be expendable if it is working on things that are not important (or visible) to the executives in charge, regardless of how well you execute.
• Make real decisions: Your team must have the ability to make decisions that it will be accountable for. A common dysfunction is when an executive makes a decision for a team then holds them accountable for it.
• Marshal resources: You must be able to secure critical resources for production (e.g., requisite staff) and depend on their availability and performance.
• Establish working agreements with other teams: For shared resources, such as people, capital, data, and tools, you must negotiate and secure access to execute optimally.
• Act autonomously: As much as possible, your team should be able to quickly decide, implement, and learn with minimal roadblocks and dependencies. Insource any competencies that are mission-critical and establish strong relationships with any needed partners.
• Establish upstream and lateral relationships: Make sure to gain visibility and influence in any decisions that will impact your circumstances. Build relationships and gain trust so you are treated as a key stakeholder.
• Establish downstream relationships: Make sure to closely partner with and serve stakeholders so they become your vocal advocates within the organization, resulting in more influence, ownership, and resources.

Missing even one of the above can cripple your team. I am surprised how often product teams are overwhelmed with work despite not having a sharp and meaningful definition of success. Do whatever it takes to make sure your team has a solid foundation from which to operate.

As your team matures, allow team members to take on more responsibilities. For example, your designer may take on defining and proving features (e.g., driving research, writing user stories, studying post-release performance) and your tech lead may drive releases and technical project management. Clearing the path for your team is one of the highest leverage activities you can focus on. It will also free you to identify how to create additional value for your customers and business.

Issue 2: New work is continuously piled onto your team, splitting focus

One of the most common reasons a team loses combat effectiveness is because it is engaged on too many fronts. Sometimes this is caused by a product manager saying “yes” to more projects than a team can productively handle, but often, the cause is broken processes for handling new initiatives, prioritizing finite bandwidth, and rejecting additional commitments.

Business owners are naturally incentivized to try many new things as quickly as possible to grow value. A dysfunction arises if a:

• Product team doesn’t have the willingness to push back or negotiate its current commitments (managers should coach and encourage this skill), or
• Team doesn’t have the ability to push back (managers should stop blaming the team, enforce above processes, and examine behaviors).

Left unchecked, a team will lose its ability to manage itself, focus its strength, and get into a flow. If there is no centralized mechanism to manage new initiatives, priorities will change constantly. This will result in short-term frustration then long-term employee churn. Those who stay may experience learned helplessness:

Work with other leaders to define:

• How much output can my team deliver in a period? (e.g., how large is our “bucket” for carrying stuff from January to March?)
• What are the rank-ordered priorities for this period? (e.g., what specific items should we carry in our bucket?) What is the prioritization process for our team and enterprise?
• What is the process for evaluating new opportunities (e.g., sales requests, changing market conditions, user discovery)? How are new requests handled?
• When can we change priorities? Example: OKRs are defined before the start of the quarter and are locked for 3-months. They can only be changed if the following arise: 1) new sales opportunities worth $2M+ per year with supporting evidence that it has a 50%+ chance of closing in 3-months and 2) Top 5 customer requests features for our messaging system. The key is to preemptively define guidelines on what is important enough to change priorities.
• What happens if priorities change? (e.g., what items should we remove in our bucket to carry the new item?)

Remember, a team’s bucket can only hold a certain number of “boulders” (e.g., user epics), “rocks” (e.g., user stories, bug fixes), “pebbles” (e.g., quick changes), and “sand” (e.g., administrative chores).

Other tips:

• If your team is asked to do additional work that it can’t productively handle, ask your manager which roadmap items should be replaced. Work on the deprioritized item should be stopped immediately. Notify stakeholders of the costs involved in unwinding a project, such as closing any loops and context switching.
• Calculate RICE scores to facilitate objective conversations about current priorities.
• Help ensure that senior leaders spot check and enforce the processes discussed above.
• Perform due diligence before committing to new work; speak to your team and get estimates from the people doing the work; be conservative in accounting for unknown unknowns.
• Set and enforce WIP limits.
• Understand if the rate of new initiatives started can be influenced or not. You might have to adapt or look for a new gig.
• Shield your team from the noise. If an opportunity is being explored but may not materialize, absorb any distractions (e.g., attend speculative meetings for them and share notes when necessary).

You will need genuine understanding and enforcement of these practices by senior leaders in order to make a difference.

Issue 3: It’s not clear how your team can get major organizational decisions made

Once you clarify the roles and responsibilities of your product team, you’ll need to do the same at the enterprise level to keep your team unblocked.

Make sure you understand how certain decisions are made at your company — who makes which decisions — how and when? You’ll need to navigate intergroup and interpersonal dynamics to influence the right people.

Even when your team makes a decision, you may need to get the proper buy-in from people who want to retain “veto or ratify” rights, such as the head of product or CEO. Neglect this step and you may be seen as a rogue agent — someone who can’t be steered or properly leveraged.

You’ll also want to identify who can referee decisions when teams have conflicting interests. This step is key so you don’t waste time duking out every simple decision or trying to drive each decision by consensus. It’s tempting to create a democracy for making product decisions, but this can grind decision making to a halt and result in suboptimal product. If a single person can obstruct, teams will be discouraged from addressing the hardest, most important problems. The incentive will be to focus on small, uncontroversial problems that won’t move the needle for customers or the business.

Issue 4: Your team doesn’t have executive air cover

Your team’s potential impact will be limited without adequate political support throughout the enterprise. Having a strong executive advocate (ideally many) will ensure that your team is plugged into the “information flow” of your organization. Your team will get the latest, critical intelligence to capitalize on opportunities and make optimal decisions.

Having executive support will also raise the visibility of your team’s purpose and accomplishments (which can easily go unsung). A strong network of people looking out for you and your team will have the biggest impact on long-term success.

An executive sponsor can ensure that resources are funneled your way, keep you out of danger (e.g., team dissolution, layoffs, impossible assignments), and help you navigate the political landscape. Regardless of how combat effective your team is, the odds are stacked against you without support from those in charge.

Be sure to develop strong relationships with senior leaders who can keep your team safe and clear its path. The best approach is not political maneuvering, it is driving results for others. If you want to leverage executives, first, let them leverage you. If you help leaders become wildly successful, they will return in kind.