Understanding Empowered Teams and how they function
Decision Making
To empower, decisions are pushed down to the product team level.
Three Snaky rules of Decision-Making:
- If you see a snake, kill it. (an important decision that has to be made)
- Don’t play with dead snakes. (don’t revisit old decisions)
- All opportunities start out looking like snakes. (opportunities often look like problems)
Empowered engineers are the single most important thing that you can have in a company.
Collaboration
Collaboration is at the heart of how strong product teams work. It’s a combination of skills and mindset, and it often takes active coaching by the manager to help new product people develop this capability.
Characteristics of strong product teams:
- Tackling risks early
- Solving problems collaboratively
- Being accountable for results.
Optimized Team Design
A product organization’s team topology answers questions such as:
How many product teams should our organization have?
What is the scope of responsibility of each team?
What are the skills required for each team, and how many of each skill?
What are the dependencies between the teams?
Optimise team design for:
- Empowerment
- Ownership
- Autonomy
- Alignment
Keys To An Effective One-On-One Meeting With The Product Person
- The Purpose – The primary purpose is to help the product person develop and improve.
- The Relationship – This is a relationship that depends on trust.
- The Frequency – Should be no less than 30 minutes, once per week, and is sacred and not to be another one of those “You okay with skipping this week?”
- Sharing Context – If you are to empower you must provide the strategic context.
- Thinking and Acting Like a Product Person – Mainly about helping the product person learn to think and act like a strong product person.
Product Leadership
For product leaders, the product team is the product.
Leadership is about recognizing that there’s greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge. People look to leadership for inspiration, and we look to management for execution.
To have truly empowered product teams, your success depends very directly on first‐level people managers.
Three steps to The Transformation
- Ensure you have strong product leaders in place.
- Empower product leaders with the ability to recruit and develop the staff required for empowered product teams.
- Redefine the relationship with the business.
Leadership is about recognizing that there’s greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.
The Challenges In Traditional Organizations
The Role of Technology: When it comes to technology, many businesses still have the old IT mindset. It is regarded as a necessary expense rather than a key business enabler. The purpose of technology teams is to “serve the business.”
Leadership: The product team is not empowered. It has a command-and-control leadership style and acts in the best interests of the business stakeholders, not the team
Empowered Teams: Teams are not empowered to solve problems in ways customers love. Feature teams are responsible for pushing out features (output) rather than enabling outcomes.
Give teams problems to solve, rather than features to build. Empower them to solve those problems in the best way they see fit.
Signs Your Team Design Is Not Fit-For-Purpose
- You are frequently shifting developers between teams
- You must frequently step in to resolve dependency conflicts
- Your developers complain of too many dependencies on other product teams in order to ship simple things
- Teams have a very limited scope of ownership
- Developers deal with too much complexity in too many areas.
Start The Transformation
You need to move your product organization from a subservient model to a collaborative model.
Four focus areas:
- The Example Starts at the Top
- Focus and Strategy
- Establishing Trust
- Deliver on Promises
Management responsibilities
- Staffing
- Coaching
- Team Objectives
- Deciding which problems should be worked on by which product teams.
- Sharing Strategic Context
The litmus test for empowerment is that the team is able to decide the best way to solve the problems they have been assigned (the objectives).
Unless leaders trust the teams this empowerment will not happen.
The Six Types Of Strategic Context
- Company Mission – The purpose of the company.
- Company Scorecard – Key performance indicators (KPIs) that provide an understanding of the overall picture and health of the business
- Company Objectives
- Product Vision and Principles
- Team Topology – Describes how each Product team will organise to deliver value.
- Product Strategy – Specifically how we’ll meet customer needs in ways that work for the business.
Feature Teams Vs Empowered Teams
In traditional organizations, feature teams focus on features and projects (output) and, as such, are not empowered or held accountable for results.
Empowered Product teams create solutions that are:
- Valuable (customers will buy the product)
- Viable (it will meet the needs of the business)
- Usable (so users can actually experience that value)
- Feasible (so the company can effectively market, sell, and support the solution).
The Three Critical Differences
Three critical differences between the strongest product companies and the rest:
- How the company views the role of technology.
- The role product leaders play.
- How the company views the purpose of the product teams—the product managers, product designers, and engineers.
Attributes of Great Product People
- Focus on the outcome
- Consider all of the risks—value, usability, feasibility, and business viability.
- Think holistically about all dimensions of the business and the product.
- Anticipate ethical considerations or impacts.
- Solve problems creatively.
- Persist in the face of obstacles.
- Leverage engineering and the art of the possible.
- Leverage design and the power of user experience.
- Leverage data to learn and to make a compelling argument.
Developing and Coaching: The Main Job Of A Leader
- Spending most of their time and energy coaching the team.
- Being self-aware of insecurities Insecure managers have a particularly hard time empowering people.
- Cultivating Diverse Points of View
- Seek out teaching moments. Many, if not most, people are not aware of their own potential. As a coach, you are in a unique position to help them see it.
- Continually earn the trust of your team. Coaching efforts will be ineffective without trust.
- Establishing personal rapport and trust by sharing some personal challenges.
Team Objectives: The Right Way
If the company is still using feature teams, as most unfortunately are, then the OKR technique is going to be a cultural mismatch, and almost certainly prove a waste of time and effort.
In the vast majority of companies that are struggling to value out of OKRs, the role of leadership is largely missing in action.
Three prerequisites for OKR’s:
- Move from the feature team model to the empowered product team model
- Stop doing manager objectives and individual objectives, and instead focus on team objectives
- Leaders need to step up and do their part to turn product strategy into action.
