Between us, the Prodify advisors have earned more than our share of gray hair working in product management. From this, we see patterns of success – and failure. These hold true across companies from different stages of growth, team sizes, industries and business models.
As our mission is to help companies become more product-driven to achieve better outcomes, we wanted to distill these. While whole books have been written about many of these topics (including by us), this article is meant to be a thought starter to quickly take inventory of the most important practices.
These are framed in a way that can be quickly assessed, at least for initial takeaways. You should be able to review each item, instantly know if you are doing it well, and potentially have some ideas for improvement. Your peers outside of Product can also observe these from afar in many cases.
Foundations of High Performing Product Teams
At the core, being a high performing product team comes down to a combination we have distilled into three major areas and three elements of each:
Focused on What Matters |
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Results Oriented |
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Built to Win |
“If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four hours sharpening the ax.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Many teams over-emphasize velocity of development and releases at the expense of clarity of direction. They rush into conceiving and building cool sounding features to keep engineering busy without sufficient understanding of customer needs, validation of key assumptions or long term thinking. In a hurry, decisions get made with the best information they have – often raw, uninformed intuition picking random areas for improvement.
While they ship ideas that sound good, their success rate is low and/or unvalidated. The product includes a lot of small, incremental improvements which survive an A/B test but get low customer adoption. At the end of the year, it’s hard to identify key innovations that added up to material improvement in their product.
You can identify many of the flaws in this approach. Insufficient customer understanding or clarity of focus is the path to building a bloated, mediocre product, regardless of the number of features it contains. To use Lincoln's metaphor: they are exerting a lot of energy swinging at a forest of trees, but using a dull ax. This creates a scattered pile of small wood chips but doesn't chop big any trees down.
Instead, you want a focus to do what Gibson Biddle defines as “DHM: ”delight customers, in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways.” At a high level, this focus requires your team to do three high level things well:
“Never mistake activity for achievement.”
– John Wooden
At many companies, product teams are goaled based on hitting dates and number of features launched. This can confuse ends with means. Shipping new features is necessary for building a great product, but it’s not sufficient. A great release can change the trajectory of a business, but many features don’t make the product better. Moreover, some features can target areas that don’t connect back to achieving business goals or getting closer to the focused vision.
Innovation requires forming hypotheses, taking some calculated risks – not all of which will pay off – and learning from both good and bad results. This requires a team to know how they will define success, measure progress and how that will lead to overall company success. The best chance of this happening is when there is cross-functional alignment on these to get focus across teams and maximum contributions from each team member.
This includes a few core attributes for a results-oriented team:
“Vision without execution is hallucination.”
– Thomas Edison
Strong focus and alignment around impact are important, but execution by a team set up for success is where the rubber meets the road. A plan only helps to the extent it leads to great achievements – at least at the key outcomes level, even if the team iterates on supporting details based on changing conditions and new insights.
The details of this could encompass much of product management and product operations, but to distill into key areas: it requires having strong people with enough capacity towards the most important initiatives, a way of operating to help the entire team contribute to the success, and a balance of time horizons and objectives to hit plans while progressing towards the longer term vision.
Having a team built to win includes these key areas:
While the above foundations are patterns we see across successful teams, implementation needs to be customized. Your team is unique and facing dynamic situations – many of your own creation including progress. The above are also not Boolean items, where you can check a box and consider the area “done.” Implementation and improvement are ongoing initiatives, e.g. how to evolve your vision as you achieve key milestones, the highest impact ways to deliver results and continually improving your team’s chances of success.
Hopefully reading the above helped serve as a reminder or trigger for areas to improve your team. How well is your team doing on each of these? Usually it’s a case of “if you know, you know” – your first instinct upon reading this blog will be a good indicator of your confidence levels.
Whether you want help with a more detailed assessment or support in how to make improvements, we’re here to help.
Feel free to email me at david@prodify.group or request a call.