We are approaching the end of this series of articles on Product Management from the trenches. In this new entry, I will focus on team management and how to bring the product management mindset to the entire organization.
As you know from reading this series, the level of maturity in product management was quite humble initially. One of my main objectives was to build a product culture throughout the organization, starting from a “Gallic stronghold” (just me in the team) until we eventually formed a product team of about 24 people.
Regarding team ceremonies, it’s a basic practice for all teams but not implemented in all companies. It involves coaching and mentoring. In my case, I established a weekly one-to-one meeting with each key team member. I won’t go into detail about how to conduct a one-to-one session, but it essentially aims to align personal and professional goals. For knowledge workers, I try to adhere to three principles (mentioned by Daniel Pink in his book Drive): mastery, autonomy, and purpose. This means highlighting learning aspects, making the person aware of their progress, providing autonomy to solve work challenges their way, and, finally, helping them understand why we do what we do and how their role contributes to it. This often involves bringing motivating challenges, and here, remember the concept of ZDP discussed in previous posts to measure the challenge level.
Additionally, as the team grows and your number of one-to-one sessions decreases to just the team leaders, it is good to take the pulse of these teams through shorter one-to-one sessions with people who do not report directly to you but to some of your managers. My idea was to sit down with each team member for at least 30 minutes each quarter, regardless of their role.
Another aspect that contributed to the creation of this culture was establishing a set of working principles. I originally made the first list of principles, but it was an open list that the team could discuss and decide which principles were relevant and applicable. Why is this relevant? Because, in the end, in any department, many micro-decisions are made daily, and having these working principles helps avoid relying on a more senior person to make a decision, leading to more sustainable and scalable processes that do not depend on a single person to function. In a way, you are empowering your team, and that is important. My mission as CPO was for the team to function independently, with my intervention only for strategic alignment.
In line with empowerment, I also did this externally by appointing product managers and product owners as the go-to people for decision-making on the initiatives they were leading, only coming to me when absolutely necessary.
As the team grew, having a good onboarding mechanism became relevant. There is a correlation between the quality of onboarding and the time a person stays in a position. Since mine had been non-existent, I aimed to have an onboarding process that made anyone joining the product team fully functional within their first week. We worked on a wiki containing all the necessary information to understand the processes, ceremonies, and information needed to navigate smoothly. Each onboarding was individually tailored with each team leader. In another entry, I will describe this onboarding process, but the basic idea is to empathize with the person joining your team, as they have likely left their job to come work with you and have many doubts and fears due to uncertainty, which you can help alleviate as much as possible.
However, the evangelization and socialization of the product management mindset did not only happen within the product team but also in other departments of the organization. If we wanted to be change agents, this was mandatory. In this sense, we carried out several initiatives. The first was to conduct training throughout the organization on what it means to work in product, focusing on results orientation, experimentation, and data-informed decisions. This training included key people from technology, marketing, sales, and even the CEO.
The second initiative was to hold sessions with different teams to explain the best ways to interact with the product team, provide tools to answer their most frequent questions, and create information radiators like the dashboards mentioned in previous entries, allowing other stakeholders to understand the dynamics within the product organization and its impact on the rest of the company’s functions.
In addition to these two initiatives, we also created a trombinoscope for the department, which included a brief description of each team member and their role, so anyone could see what each person’s role and experience were and how to connect with them professionally and personally.
Regarding continuous improvement, we also carried out several initiatives. For example, we established a product library, where we bought a product book each month to gradually build references to consult. Additionally, each team leader was responsible for defining a training plan for their team members to cover some skill gaps. For some team members, we also did coaching with external coaches to help them step out of the company’s echo chamber and help me scale in coaching and mentoring practices.
Finally, to close the loop, we included a feedback mechanism through quarterly retrospectives and anonymized eNPS surveys, allowing us to take the pulse of the product team and take corrective actions needed for our ceremonies and working methods to ensure everyone felt part of the product organization and we were aligned with the goals to be achieved.
In summary, creating a product culture is not something that happens overnight. You have to be intentional about it and dedicate the necessary effort and energy to make the magic happen. You have to use your highest doses of empathy to adapt the context to the many needs of people and teams to align them with the right mindset and strategic direction.
Have you faced these challenges of creating a product culture? How did you do it? Write to me to share your experience. Thank you very much for reading this far. Greetings and see you next week.