The “secret sauce” for effective product teams.
A well-oiled product team is a beautiful thing. They adapt to change with ease, come up with brilliant ideas, and get sh*t done at speed.
We assemble product teams as a balanced gathering of designers, developers, and product managers, but that balance of brilliance isn’t enough: we believe that at the core of being an effective team is psychological safety.
What is Psychological Safety?
Team psychological safety is not a novel concept. Coined by Amy Edmonson in the 90s, it describes the conditions required for teams (product or not) to be candid. Teams then reap the benefits of that candour towards better effectiveness (or whichever trending productivity adjective for effectiveness you prefer).
We’re a little less specific. Here are a few ways we see psychological safety manifest to enable product teams to work smoothly:
・openness to perspectives other than your own
・fearlessness in the face of failure
・willingness to speak up against the status quo
If product teams are able to check these boxes as a baseline, then they’re on the right track towards psychological safety. And on the right track to being an effective product team.
Why It’s Important
So why do we care about psychological safety? To us, it’s the absolute foundation for a product team to collaborate effectively, regardless of what methodology / approach, agile or not, the team adopts.
It’s so crucial that in engagements where our main mission is to accelerate an existing product team, the first area we assess (how to best help them) is how well the team itself works as a team, i.e. if they are demonstrating what we deem as psychological safety.
Of course, we also assess the state of the product and how well agile methods are understood and implemented. However, with more than half of the teams we’ve recently helped demonstrating challenges with product or execution that stem from an underlying issue of team dynamics, it’s clear to us the necessity of the prerequisite that is psychological safety.
We’ve taken this lesson to heart when we help establish product teams from the ground up. For nascent product teams, psychological safety is a concept we introduce early on (including ways to upkeep it), way before any ‘real’ product work starts. And we’ve found that the more aware and active teams are in maintaining psychological safety, the more easily they hit the ground running and handle internal strife when actual product-building kicks off.
A First-hand Account
But don’t just take it from us — we spoke with Ken, one of our client developers at Honda, on how they’ve felt first-hand the importance of fostering psychological safety a newly established product team:
Why do you think psychological safety is necessary?
K: I originally thought agreeing on the same development method was the most important thing for a young product team. But, in order to agree and effectively debate the best way to work, it requires our team to openly disagree or challenge each other, even if it means uncomfortable conversations. This can be hard for a young product team like us to do.
How do you see teams without psychological safety?
K: I see it as increased communication cost. As developers, we typically want to know what we’re building, why we’re doing it, and then get right to it. And we can get there quickly if everyone is able to admit what they didn’t understand or to bring up concerns, on the spot. If not, these things come back to slow down the team as additional conversations to clarify, to assuage uncertainties. This is additional time we’re spending, which can be avoided from the beginning if the team feels safe to bring up how they feel, then and there.
What do you try to do to encourage psychological safety?
K: Actually, I don’t agree with trying to ‘create’ psychological safety because I see it as so fundamental for any respectful interaction. What I do instead is try to see my team members beyond just their role at work, simply spending the time to go for coffee and getting to know them as a person. This ‘time’ might appear counterproductive, but investing in our bond (especially as a newly formed team) helps decrease how much time we’ll otherwise spend digging up issues.
Secret Sauce = Psychological Safety
When the team is at an impasse, take a few steps back and look at it from a different angle:
・Is there an unspoken but palpable imbalance of influence within the team?
・Are there chronic issues with ways of work that spillover onto your product, but nobody ever brings it up?
We find a lot of clients come to us hoping that by adopting the right methods, the best product development processes, they’ll achieve all-star product team status. Unfortunately, a process or a set of methods is only as effective as the team that wields it. And to us, the key to unlocking that effectiveness is the secret sauce of psychological safety.
(Check out what we do to encourage team psychological safety here!)
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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.
