Successful product teams are not a myth. It all starts with the customer.
I’m a lucky guy! A few times in my career, I’ve enjoyed working with highly effective and successful product teams. You know, the ones that think the way their customers do. The ones that have built enough credibility, not to be derailed by crazy senior executive ideas. These are the ones that deliver like clockwork.
Why is it important? Because no company can succeed over the long-haul if they’re not a great product company. It all starts with great product teams.
So, is there a magic recipe for becoming a successful product team? What are these teams doing that others aren’t? How can they sustain success over time and through the unavoidable changes?
Fascinating questions! Here’s my attempt at summarizing what I’ve seen work. It comes down to four primary traits that are even more critical in these times of accelerated changes.
#1: They build a product vision and strategy from deep customer insights
Successful product teams are crystal clear on whom they serve, the fundamental problems these audiences face, and why they’re the best to address these. This dimension is probably the most critical. It also means they have one definition of success.
It requires one function (often product management) to take the lead and spend tremendous energy trying to truly understand what’s going on in their customers’ minds. For this, data and analytics are not enough; product teams need to lead rich one-to-one interactions with their customers (or future customers).
Empathy helps them walk in their customers’ shoes. It is an on-going effort: if a product team doesn’t interact weekly with at least one customer (and this is a minimum), they’re making stuff up.
Customer empathy is the key to understanding why customers act or think a certain way. It helps translate and prioritize customers’ problems into tangible solutions. It is the key to retaining customers over the long-haul.
If you want to learn more about customer empathy and some associated techniques, check our free playbook on the top questions to ask during rich one-to-one interactions.
#2 They're not defined by an organization chart
At this stage, you might wonder what I mean by “team.” Let’s step back a bit and quickly review the team’s notion and what its key attributes are. Probably the best definition I’ve seen of teams is from Google’s Aristotle project:
“Teams are highly interdependent – they plan work, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress in service of a specific project. Team members need one another to get work done”.
Most importantly, successful product teams don’t need to show up on an organization chart as is. The different functions can report to their respective functional leader (like engineers to engineering leaders, product marketers to marketing). Some might think that it’s a recipe for tension, but as long as they stay laser–sharp focused on the customer and resulting product vision and strategy, they have the right filters.
Trait #3: They stick to specific functions and a manageable size
While many variants exist out there, keeping a product team at a manageable size and with the right functional representation is paramount.
The minimum viable format I’ve seen work included one product manager, one product designer, a couple of engineers, and a product marketer. That’s it!
One will argue that program management, technical support, more marketing, even sales should belong to product teams. Not from what I’ve seen. While they’re key stakeholders and belong to the greater organization, these other roles usually span many products and solutions and benefit from a functional organization.
Over the years, I’ve seen much debate on whether product marketing belongs to product teams: IT DOES! When your product marketing is joined to the hip with the rest of the product team, you will gain incredible consistency between your product and go-to-market stories. You will have a formidable ambassador to the whole marketing and sales organization, avoiding any second-guessing or impaired trust.
You see teams grow naturally through engineering, as you need more talent working on the solution to the identified problems. But, is there a maximum size for a product team? Yes, there is. Once you go beyond 10-12 people, you start losing effectiveness. You spend much time on alignment and in meetings. Most successful large tech companies in Silicon Valley have managed to scale while keeping core product teams at a small manageable size.
#4: They operate on trust and cohesion
It is another critical aspect of successful product teams: they’re not disbanded at the end of a project. They keep working together, solving evolved customer problems. Over time trust is cemented. They know, respect, and profoundly care for each other.
They act as one team and have enabled an open dialog, especially on how they need to prioritize their work. Trust and openness lead to a “no -BS” culture, and when in doubt, they always refer back to the customer’s voice and the problems worth solving.
Lastly, they keep their cohesion throughout. Change is a constant and, no matter what, team members will come and go. Yet, successful teams know how to establish a psychological safety net for new members. New arrivals feel like they are making progress and that the team is making progress as well. Existing members act as mentors and teach them about success in the real world. For example, new team members will spend a disproportionate amount of time with customers. It doesn’t matter what role they have. Rich one-to-one interactions will help them better grasp the problems at hand.
You can build your successful product teams too!
Successful product teams are not a myth. I’ve seen them in action, and they make a world of difference for their company. Their relentless focus on gaining the right customer insights is critical. Still, they also know how to organize their efforts and build cohesion over time. All of this is impossible to achieve without great leaders who understand the value of such a construct.
At The Product Sherpa, we consider that nurturing product team excellence is a fundamental skill that existing and aspiring leaders need to master. If you are getting to a point where you feel stuck and need more guidance to take the right actions or want to dig deeper into the topics covered in this article, reach out to us. We’ll be delighted to be that guide.