Building Your Product Team

High performing Product Teams are formed through high trust relationships, shared vision and next level camaraderie.

We're assembling a menu of activities to rapidly move your team through early stages of team formation (storming, forming, norming) and into the performing zone.

In it's simplest form, a Product Team is a group of people coming together to solve a customer problem.

We're biased towards digital product here - where product teams consist of skills across:

• Product Management

• Product Engineering

• Product Design

• Data

• Product Marketing

Depending in your org you may have dedicated specilist for these functions - or you might have team members where multiple hats. What's important to recognise is that all of these work together to give you the best chance of creating something people love to use.

The folks over at Miro have a rather neat acronym for the AMPED - which stands for Analytics (i.e. Data), Marketing, Product, Engineering and Design. 

Why does "Trust" matter? Well, just like any team with a shared mission - no one person can do it all. A team will rely on the individual players to do their jobs and make decisions for the benefit of the team. This is where trust matters - you are working together and relying on others for a common purpose. Without trust you have much less chance of success.

What does high Trust look like?

• Decision ownership is clear. Decision are made fast and communicated across the team

• Bad news is delivered twice as fast as good news. In high trust situations, there is low fear of failure and bad news. The team receives it and course corrects, fast.

• Feedback - the hard kind - is BAU. It is a daily practice that everyone thrives on

How can you build trust?

There are a couple of foundations - being competent at your role  being a major one. This is often hard for Product Managers because there really isn't a shared viewed of what is/is not product management. It is usually much clearer for other roles in the team - Engineers write the code, Designers create the UX. So for Product Managers it is important to create clarity of roles and responsibilites with your team. Setting this foundation will go a long way to earning the trust of your team.

A simple starting point is to survey your team and ask them what they think the PM role is and the responsibilities it should cover. You will learn quickly how much the team expects of you and how diverse those expectations are. It's not uncommon for the PM to be viewed as the "catch all" for anything that doesn't neatly fit into one of the existing team roles. 

In addition to the competency for the role, we're humans at the end of the day and we all have our quirks and a history that has lead us to where we are. Empathy is created by learning more about someone, learn more about each other with these team exercises:

• How to work with me

• River of life

"Communication" is a funny thing that means a lot of different things, in a lot of difference contexts.

Within a team context we can think of it as shared language and customs. 

Often, misunderstands occur because context is not shared and language is not labelled. There is tension between "simple and concise" and "clear and comprehensive" - it is not uncommon for two people to walk away from a conversion with completely different interpretations. This is a whole of team challenge - but particularly important for PMs who often play a connector role with other parts of the org.

The key thing to recognise as a PM is that this is "the work". There is no silver bullet, no one way to rule all others. You will need to learn which styles and methods work best for your team and counterparts across your org. You will need to continuously refine your key messages and repeat them more often then you like. Cutting and slicing content across different mediums will be key to success - you want the same message with different shapes:

1. An "elevator pitch" for a business exec you want to support your ideas

2. A "one pager" to outline what it is and why it matters to customers and your org. You'll use this to communicate "up and out" of your direct team (your manager, your group etc)

3. The detail - a long form artefact or series of artefacts folks can "double-click" into for more information - also used by your direct team to execute.

*this is not exhaustive but rather illustrates the point - there is no silver bullet.

Some fun team based games to work in providing clear and concise instructions

• Blind origami

• Keep talking and nobody explodes (paid)

Creative problem solving is essential if you want to move fast as a team. Generating ideas is pretty easy - but great ideas is a skill to develop. If you only ever seem to generate incremental ideas, building and flexing your team's creativity will unlock step change. You'll find new ways to leverage your data, insights and experience to generate the next big ideas.

Jake Knapp's SPRINT framework is great reading full of lots of ideas to take flex your creative product muscles. Other team tools to build the creativity muscles:

• Crazy 8s

• One text at a time

These activities are designed to be lightweight and only require a little preparation. 

BUT......just because they're lightweight doesn't get you off the hook that easy - as the facilitator you need to have a goal, select the activity and prepare the team - do this and you'll have a bag of fun and grow together.

Each activity will serve a different purpose, take a different amount of time and require different ingredients. 

• Category: 

• Time Required: Roughly how long you'll need to complete one round of the activity.

• # Participants: How many folks can participate and in what format (pairs, teams, solo etc

• Ingredients: What tech or materials you need for the activity.

• Goal: What is the goal of the activity? e.g. Get to know your team, Learn to describe a problem, increase creativity through speed and iteration. 

• Activity Flow: How the activity starts, progresses and wraps up.

• Setup: How to arrange participants and ingredients to start the activity.

• Instructions: How to run the activity, step-by-step.

• Debrief: Questions to explore with the team at the completion of the activity

• Pro-tips: Ideas to spice it up or vary the activity - of course, you're welcome to jam your own way too!