How to Make Your Product Team Work Better (Our Secret Sauce Recipe Exposé)

Go ahead. Steal our recipe for effective product teams. (image courtesy of Unsplash)

We’ve hopefully landed the point that psychological safety is the secret sauce for effective product teams. To reiterate, it’s what we believe begets a truly balanced team*, which is what you need for some real product magic.
*we define a balanced team as a flat team of specialists shouldering the pillars of product: users / desirability, tech / feasibility, and business impact / viability

But how do we make this secret sauce? Here’s the recipe that’s been working for us at Tanzu Labs:

Ingredients

• team agreements, established early to let slowly marinate into team culture
• feedback sessions and retros, scheduled regularly
• coffee time, whenever the team needs a respite from the grind (← totally unintentional pun)

Method

1. Create and agree on a set of team agreements as early as possible.

Team agreements guide how we approach work. They also give us a common barometer on which we measure how we’re showing up for each other. Set these up early on, when the product team is freshly assembled so they marinate and seep into how the team runs.

For example, these are our team agreements that date back to our Pivotal Labs days:

Team Agreements from our Pivotal Labs days.

From ad-hoc conversations with teammates to coming up with the right experiment to validate upcoming product features, these team agreements tacitly stay or sway our hand. Your agreements should do the same.

Tip: agreement is the operative word — ensure these are established with full buy-in from everyone from the get-go, including language and tone; if no one thinks they’re cool, no one will refer back to them

2. Build feedback sessions and retros into iteration cycles (and stick to them).

So your team’s set up and everyone’s agreed on how they want to work. Great, but iteration cycles roll on, and you’re suddenly caught at a breaking point of unspoken tensions — this is normal. Even if everyone is engaged and loves their product, your team will need opportunities to let out this pent up cortisol.

So,

• put in feedback sessions for everyone

A feedback session is an intentional chunk of one-on-one time where teammates candidly identify for each other how they’ve shown up to the team. You’ll be amazed how many issues can be resolved when team members spend time to talk to each other like this.

Radical Candour model of effective feedback.

The feedback we refer to here can be textbook-constructive, but it doesn’t have to be. Bottom line: everyone should have regular face time with everyone else to bring up concerns, to catch up on the good, and of course, the bad.

Tip: wise words from a veteran PM: err on the side of specificity when giving feedback — this will inevitably push you to observe your team more closely, noticing positive moments or things that could have gone better — and your teammates will reciprocate in kind!

And,

• put in retros weekly* and every time you reach a big milestone
  *the cadence of the retros is up to how you run iterations

Example of a weekly retro board.

If the team’s running at velocity, or especially when your product is in its infancy, a week can mean a lot of change (and work done). Have the team come together and review what went wrong, what went right, and what might be useful to try for next week. This is the forum to give everyone a chair at the table and bring up anything for the team as a whole.

Similarly, every milestone your team reaches means a lot of trial and error, impromptu innovations, and (hopefully) wins! A post-milestone retro is important for everyone to digest how you got there, and to distill everyone’s experience into learnings that can accelerate how you reach the next milestone.

Tip: put feedback sessions and retros loud and proud on whatever team calendar you’re using

3. Take people out for coffee.

Half an hour away from the grind can be just what the team needs. (image courtesy of Unsplash)

You’ve got a set of well-marinated team agreements, the team is diligent in feedback and retros, but despite that, you catch a whiff of team strife.

It’s important to intermittently take a step back and take the pulse of the team. The grind can take its toll, no matter how well-functioning the team is. Release went well, there are a handful of critical bugs left to squash, and everyone is committed to powering through. However, you felt some friction in your most recent team sync. This is your clue to give everyone a one-off change of scenery.

Hit the big pause button and let the team breathe: it can be a surprise coffee break, it can be your next sync run in the nice meeting room upstairs, it can be prying your engineers aside from their code for a 30-minute game of Gartic Phone with the rest of your team.

Tip: stand your ground against the skepticism of this seeming divestment from the task at hand; these moments are, in fact, an investment in the long-run and everyone will applaud them after the fact

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Try New ‘Ingredients’

We are also trying new ways to make that secret sauce even better (or just a bit differently). Here are a couple of examples:

Role-swap

Developers <-> PMs; Designers <-> Developers; PMs <-> Designers! (edited image courtesy of Unsplash)

We recently trialed a one-day role swap: developers were product managers and designers, and the designers and PMs were developers. What came about as an impromptu idea from an ex-engineer client PM (whose coding withdrawal got the best of him) became a meaningful empathy exercise for the team.

Caveat here is you’re guaranteed to be less productive that day. Inadvertently, you’ll have what could be coding, prototyping, and roadmapping first-timers at the helm of those to-dos. And indeed, during our one-day role swap, this was exactly the case. The bulk of the time was spent simply navigating how to go about the daily tasks of their counterparts.

The well-worth-it boon, on the other hand, was an increased understanding of the lens through which other roles consider the same product. It helped the team see into why other roles might bring up seemingly inconsequential concerns, lending to more collaborative discussions.

Emotional Seismograph

Tracing the team’s emotional state together.

We’ve been using a version of the emotional seismograph during milestone retros to great effect lately. The concept is straightforward: team members trace their emotional state over an approximated timeline. Then, everyone homes in on the peaks and valleys of their lines and briefly jots down why or what made them feel that way.

This is great for visualising everyone’s state of mind based on timeline events, surfacing and contextualising emotional inflection points. It’s illuminating to see where these inflection points align, and equally so to notice where they didn’t.

Retracing everyone’s dips and upticks, then hearing their elaborations makes for a natural and meaningful recap of how the team reached that hard-earned milestone.

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Make Your Own Recipe

To be blunt, you don’t need to follow what I’ve suggested here and recreate it to a tee in your team. Heck, you don’t even need to prescribe to the notion that the textbook definition of psychological safety is what you need for your team to be effective. You can call that secret sauce whatever you’d like.

Borrowing the admittedly idealistic, but surprisingly practical mantra from our team agreements at Labs: just “do what works” to bring that state of candour to your team.

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I’m Nico, a Product Manager at Tanzu Labs by Broadcom (formerly Pivotal Labs). Will be spewing thoughts on product management, on ways to help teams do better, and sometimes on things entirely unrelated.