Running Empowered Product Teams

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Situation

So, you’ve been assigned as the PM on a cross-functional team and given an ambitious problem to solve. Your success depends on getting everyone inspired & starting to collaborate effectively together. But how exactly do you do that?

(Following is a compilation of individual bits of advice I’ve given many times to my team. I’m compiling it here in case this is useful to anyone else. Hat tip to Marty Cagan who introduced the worked “empowered” in Product lexicon)

1. Adopting a Leader’s mindset

As a PM, you’re automatically expected to be the leader of the team. You are the captain of the ship. And you have to adopt the leader’s mindset. This can be quite fulfiling, but also comes with its responsibilities & challenges.

First & foremost, leadership means taking accountability. If you succeed, you attribute it to the team. But if you fail, the leader must take accountability.

Remember, getting any successful project to complete is not a one-person job. You need the skills of everyone in the team, and get these individuals to collaborate effectively. You don’t need to come up with all the answers yourself. Your job is to keep everyone focused on the same problem and then let distributed mental processing happen. Each team member needs to be thinking of a specific aspect of the same problem, applying their expertise to it.

Team members should not be task takers, but proactive problem solvers. This is possible only when everyone understands the “whys” of the situation, when they are kept in-the-know about what’s happening across the team, and when they have sufficient psychological safety.

2. Setting up the team

• Team building — To kick off, it is important to get the team members to feel connected with each other. Organizing a team lunch or dinner is a relatively decent way to achieve this.
• Context setting — It is also important to bring everyone on the same level of context. Everyone should understand the problem we’re going after, why it is an important problem, and what is the current stage of solution. A good idea here is to organise a kickoff workshop where you walk everyone through the problem space, all the associated context and then have a brainstorming session to get everyone’s creative juices flowing.
• Audit skills & bandwidth — Make sure the team has the right skillsets, and that the individuals are sufficiently committed to the team’s objectives. It can create unnecessary friction when team-mates are not aligned on the bandwidth commitment required by the team. Likewise, you would hit a roadblock if a necessary skillset is missing in the team. Escalate & seek help from your leaders if you feel a critical skill is missing in the team.
• Routines & Rituals — You should also discuss with the team the rhythms they want to follow. I cover the practices I like in this post. You can use this as a guide, as you discuss the exact rituals within the team.

3. Streamline communication & knowledge management

To enable folks to contribute effectively, you need to keep them in the know. Not everyone needs to be involved in every discussion, but people should have a passive awareness of all the important things that are happening. Some simple things can go a long way here -

• Use common channels for communication — Avoid talking in DMs & 1:1s. Use public channels. If you do have an important discussion in a smaller group, consider posting a summary in the team channel for everyone’s awareness.
• Key Decisions — Share decisions broadly using the team channels. Keep a decision log. This is important not only to keep team members informed, but also for posterity. In the future, as the situation evolves, people might need to backtrack & understand why a specific decision was taken. Having proper documentation of decisions might feel tedious in the current moment, but like any good investment, it will start giving compounding returns to the organization in the future.
• Have a Single Source of Truth for the team’s strategy — Everyone should be on the same page with regards to the team’s strategy. Have a single document which outlines this. Keep updating the same document whenever there is a strategic shift. Avoid fragmenting the strategy into multiple documents, it is a recipe for chaos

A good mental model to have is — if a new person joins the team today, how can we get them onboarded as fast & easily as possible? Not only is this likely to become a real situation, but thinking in this fashion will nudge the team to take actions (like proper documentation) which helps with overall productivity.

4. Routines & Rituals

Bringing smart people together is not enough for them to make them work effectively together. They will need a skeleton working model, a set of routines & rhythms for effective collaboration. Some best practices for this (based on my experience) are what I cover below.

1. Team’s Charter document — This is the single source of truth for the team’s long term strategy. It should be a live document containing all the context around the problem team is trying to solve, why it is important, how they’re planning to solve it and what are the high level milestones.
2. Team Prioritisation & Updates — The team will need a regular cadence to discuss what each individual is working on, what are their updates & discuss any blockers and challenges. Generally, having this as a synchronous live session is more effective and leads to better cohesiveness, as opposed to asynchronous offline updates. The prioritisation can be weekly or fortnightly with more frequent standups to discuss updates & blockers.
3. Program Tracker — This is an operational artifact. It contains details of specific workstreams. The team should be using one to keep a tap on week-on-week progress. We can leverage the same artifact to keep stakeholders updated. But before sharing this with stakeholders, one needs to ensure that the program tracker is intuitive for someone outside the team, who’s only observing the goings on at an arm’s length and not involved in nitty-gritty everyday execution. So the tracker needs to be at the right level of abstraction. It’s needs to be useful to outside stakeholders as well as to the team for operational tracking. One simple way to do this is to group individual worksteams into a higher order ‘theme’, have intuitive milestones for each ‘theme’ and then use traffic light status (completed / on track / at risk / not started ) for each theme.
4. Keeping stakeholders in the know — The team will have some key stakeholders & sponsors who are interested in the team’s progress. It is the team’s responsibility to keep them in the know and uphold a high bar on transparency. A simple way to achieve this via a charter doc & program tracker.
5. Decision Gates — There are typically 3 decision gates in product work i) Deciding to spend time on a particular discovery activity, ii) Finalising product specifications at the end of discovery stage, and iii) Reviewing results & next steps post launch. Based on the specifics — like how much resources are going to be spend in developing & maintaining, how many users are going to be impacted, degree of impact to those users — judgement needs to be applied as to the right forum to make the decision. For many day to day decisions, the discussion should be within the team itself. But for decisions with large implications, like something requiring multiple months of work, the team should proactively align the decision with senior leadership before committing the company’s resources in a particular direction.
6. Team Brainstorming — It’s also a good idea to have a regular team forum for brainstorming. Focus of this session should be a specific open question we need to answer. Person leading the discussion should determined based on the topic. For example — for UX question it may be led by the team’s Design Owner, while for an engineering architecture question it may be led by the Engineering Owner. Note that the individual leading the discussion needs to do adequate prep work to make the discussion effective. They need to set the right context at the start of the meeting, and have a plan of how to run the meeting. Post the meeting, they need to process the discussion & follow up with next steps.
7. Fast & low-risk feedback loops — Creating anything of value, requires a LOT of iteration. It is typical for the first idea we come up with to not work out. So the trick to success is — how fast can we iterate & learn, and how do we keep it cheap? There’s a lot of good advice online on the product craft, MVPs and hypothesis testing. Leverage paper-ware, design-prototypes, MVPs, A/B tests.
8. Regular SME (Subject Matter Expert) panel meetings — One format I highly encourage teams to adopt is to have a panel of SMEs & Leaders who can give constructive feedback. The idea is to leverage this forum to show output of team’s brainstorming sessions & other early-stage low-fi work, so that any significant course correction can be identified early on, without wasting a lot of cycles. This meeting can be a game changer, especially for high VUCA problem spaces.

5. Having fun

Don’t forget to have fun! Celebrate achievements. Connect with your team mates at a personal level & get to know each other as full individuals. Years from now, you will not remember all the trials & tribulations you faced, but rather the camaraderie & sense of belongingness you felt as a team!