Do you have a product vision, but no team to execute it? Where do you start looking for prospective employees?
An effective product leader is nothing without a strong team to lead. In technology-driven companies, product teams should be empowered to figure out how to solve customers’ problems rather than merely tasked with creating new product features.
Take a look at how to build a strong team that’s perfect for your vision.
1. Recruiting Your Team
To know how to build a strong team, you must know how to recruit strong people. However, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones argue that you shouldn’t place too much emphasis on hiring enormously exceptional people. Instead, you should hire people with competence and character.
Competence: Look beyond traditional qualifications such as elite college educations, and instead look for people who combine technical skills with a passion for work, an eagerness to learn, and a desire for personal growth. You generally want people who already have the skills to handle the work, but sometimes it’s worth taking a chance on someone with unproven potential—as long as you’re willing to help that person build the necessary skills on the job.
Character: Cagan and Jones caution that looking for people with good character doesn’t necessarily mean looking for people who have a good “cultural fit” with your company. Companies that hire for cultural fit often end up hiring the same type of person—typically, male graduates of top universities—which creates teams where everyone thinks alike. Instead, hire people who think differently from you and who come from various career and education paths, as diversity promotes innovation in tech fields. People with a variety of backgrounds bring an equivalent variety of ideas—a recipe for empowering out-of-the-box thinking.
2. Developing Your Team
Post-recruitment, it’s crucial to invest in your team’s development. Cagan and Jones stress the importance of creating opportunities for training and professional growth while also nurturing an environment that encourages team members to brainstorm, ask questions, and take risks.
(Shortform note: In addition to strengthening your team’s performance, providing ongoing training serves other functions. As recounted by Tony Hsieh in Delivering Happiness, the shoe retailer Zappos found that continual learning was a great boost to morale. Also, from a practical, long-term perspective, Zappos recognized that continuing education is crucial to prepare employees to move up in the company as senior team members retire or move on, a topic that Cagan and Jones touch on next.)
If you’re going to help team members reach their full potential, it’s vital to understand your employees’ career goals. Some might wish to remain individual contributors while advancing their professional skills. Others may aspire to take leadership roles, while some may be uncertain and wish to explore different options. By allowing for different developmental paths, you retain top talent and create an atmosphere where continual learning is the norm.
(Shortform note: Many employees may fall into Cagan and Jones’s latter category—those who aren’t sure what they want from their careers. They may be too swamped with work to think about it, or your company’s structure may not offer a clear path forward. In either case, you should avoid steering employees too forcefully toward specific career paths. Instead, help them determine what they enjoy most in their current role and let them explore new areas of interest. You can also expand their view of their careers by letting them attend industry conferences or serve on interdepartmental committees.)
3. Empowering Your Team
Once your product team is in place and you’ve set up the means to help them develop, it’s time to step out of their way and let them work. Cagan and Jones advise that product leaders should give teams ownership of their duties, promote a culture of collaboration, and understand that mistakes are essential to success.
To promote a sense of ownership in your team, say Cagan and Jones, product leaders should set clear, meaningful objectives rather than giving teams lists of jobs to do. By defining “what” needs to be achieved without dictating “how,” you make team members responsible for the results of their work, not just for following a specified method. Granting teams this type of ownership over their objectives encourages workers to feel responsible for achieving the company’s wider mission. This increases team members’ engagement, which then opens doors to innovation. After all, when workers start thinking like owners, they turn their focus to the outcome of their work instead of just making sure all their tasks are done.
Next, Cagan and Jones recommend that you encourage interactions between team members so individuals can collaborate and learn from each other. Collaboration in this case doesn’t imply that your team should make decisions based on consensus or compromise—instead, team members should work together toward solutions that derive from each person’s unique knowledge and skills. This constructive sharing of ideas boosts growth and confidence within your team while working toward your company’s larger business goals.
Lastly, to truly empower a team, say Cagan and Jones, product leaders must understand that failures are often stepping stones toward success. Rather than punishing mistakes, leaders should nurture a work environment where exploration is encouraged. Experimentation often leads to new breakthroughs faster than conventional methods might allow. Keep in mind that innovative exploration only thrives when team members feel psychologically safe. As a leader, it’s your task to ensure your team feels respected and that their contributions are valued as crucial to the business’s innovative growth and progress, even when their contributions and ideas don’t work out as intended.
4. Structuring Your Organization
Even the best product teams don’t exist in isolation. How teams are organized within a business structure plays as important a role as how well individual teams function. An effective structure clarifies how teams interact while keeping them aligned with company interests, granting them autonomy to meet their objectives without undermining other teams’ roles, and remaining dynamic enough to adjust in response to evolving business realities.
Creating a product often involves multiple teams working toward a shared purpose, which raises the question of how to organize their work. Some teams design products directly for the customer, while others exist to support their fellow teams. Team relationships can get complicated quickly, so Cagan and Jones write that it’s vital to establish each team’s area of responsibility and authority. The framework this creates, called a “team topology,” clarifies how teams relate to each other while defining their individual areas of expertise. Ideally, your company’s structure will be such that all teams remain aligned with your company’s vision by keeping them focused on how their work contributes to the end-user experience.
Cagan and Jones say it’s important to remember that team structures aren’t static—they evolve over time. For instance, a company’s IT department might need to take on additional work when other teams launch products. If left unmanaged, this evolution of duties may lead to a growing imbalance of work that leads to unexpected bottlenecks throughout the production process. Therefore, team structures need regular review and adjustment due to the shifting realities of your business. Signs that indicate a change is needed include frequently shifting employees between teams or receiving complaints about excessive slowdowns from different sectors of your business.
