As a product leader, if we want to build an empowered, accountable product team there are 3 areas we need to look at: How can we help create this sort of team as we lead tomorrow?
Missionaries vs Mercenaries
As a product leader do you want to have a team that is there for the paycheck or the product and the customers? Does the product team you lead consist of missionaries or mercenaries? As Marty Cagan puts it: “Teams of missionaries are engaged, motivated, have a deep understanding of the business context, and tangible …
What risk?
As I was walking down a trail outside of Vancouver, I encountered this warning sign. It was one of several signs highlighting the risks some cliffs ahead posed to life and limb. Clearly, those who came before us failed to consider the risks, and they installed both a fence and numerous signs in the mild …
Great Teams Improve Mediocre Ideas
Why is having a great team so important to a successful product and company? Because sometimes our ideas as product leaders aren’t the best! “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or …
Mediocrity
Product teams launch mediocre products when we fail to learn as we build. We build for months, even years, never truly learning if we are building the right thing. “What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of …
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is one of the secrets to a successful team. Teams without vulnerability struggle to work together because they don’t know or trust each other. Achieving vulnerability-based trust is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations. It …
Predictably Irrational
As leaders, it is important to recognize in ourselves and others just how “predictably irrational” we are. How, although we think we make all of our decisions based on sound logic and reason, we regularly make irrational decisions. A good introduction to this is Dan Ariely’s talk on this topic: And if you time, I …
Principles vs Rules
Certifications are an information-dense method of getting up to speed on the work we do as product managers. But they also can mislead us into thinking that this set of rules or process we learn are a recipe for success. We can forget to think about them as principles to guide, and we fail to …
Necessary Conflict?
Are your team meetings boring? Do you find your team avoiding controversial topics in order to “play nice”? Do changes only happen through backchannels? If so, your team might have a fear of conflict. I’m not talking about personal attacks, mean-spirited comments, and the like. But if you want better ideas from your team, if …
Patterns
As we transition from a Waterfall to an Agile approach to planning and product management, there is fear that there will be no plan, no organization, and long term vision. In the book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander captures well though how we can use patterns, starting small and growing bigger to create a town …