Empowered Teams and Strong Product Culture
Empowered Teams and Strong Product Culture
Start from learning the anti-patterns of Feature Factories
Culture is not what you say or think; it’s what you do.
This post is inspired by Marty Cagan’s Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products.
Time and again, we see corporate executives touting the company culture. How much of it is hype or based on reality? Just like everything else in life, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
As soon as you grow over 20 employees, all bets are off on what you think about your company culture. With every new employee cohort, you got to work exponentially hard to get closer to your aspirational culture described in the corporate presentations.
Let’s make it a bit more concrete. Go ahead and answer these questions for starters:
What problems at work are you willing to tackle with utmost urgency, and which ones are you okay with ignoring?
An employee is not performing well. At what threshold of degradation are you going to act — performance plan, fire?
How often do you say in a day, “let’s take it offline and discuss it?” (What message are you sending?)
Which shortcuts are you willing to take, and for whose benefit?
The answers to these questions and more in this line of thinking determine how you live your day; forming habits. A group’s collective habits or patterns are what we call an organization’s culture. Successful companies develop them methodically with a lot of thought going into it.
What are some traits of such companies building and delivering outstanding digital products?
Technology as an asset
Strong product cultures are based on the fundamental belief that technology is a force multiplier. They may be in any sector — banking, healthcare, retail, etc. — but they see technology as a core asset. On the other hand, companies with weak product cultures think of technology as an expense. If you talk to the senior leaders, they describe the sector they are in as their core business: “we are a pharmaceutical company; technology is not our core competency.” Replace pharmaceutical with any other industry/sector.
No matter what industry you are in, it is well established by now you need a solid technology base. Without it, you always play catch up. It’s ironic, as Marty Cagan puts it in Empowered: the companies that say technology is not their “core” and outsource spend much more on the tech.
Culture question: What are you doing to drive innovation by leveraging the technology that was unavailable last decade or even a few years ago?
Strong Product Leadership
When I refer to product leadership, it’s not just the leaders in the product management team. It is all leaders who are entrusted to build and deliver products. Typically, product managers, designers, and technical leaders. As we are talking about culture here, how you see your role as a leader determines how you operate. And how you operate defines your culture.
In mediocre product organizations, you are a slave to the so-called business. Recall the previous point; you have a foregone conclusion that the role of tech is to serve the business. The culture in these orgs is the business tells me what to work on, and I do that. My role is to deliver the product I said I would deliver within the timelines and budget—a classic project-thinking mindset.
Strong product leaders lead (surprise!). They are not a delivery wing alone; they lead the way in problem definition and exploring various ways they can use the previously impossible technology.
Strong leaders lead from the front. They don’t confine themselves to being people managers. They are thinking about how best to shape the product matching the technical roadmap with a product roadmap (more on it below). They build trust with their peers and their teams through their actions.
Culture question: How are you staffing, coaching, nurturing the right talent, and showing the door to the wrong ones?
Empowered Product Teams
Marty Cagan explains this concept by first discussing how disempowered teams look and operate; He uses the term Feature Teams. Feature Teams are cross-functional, but perhaps that’s where the comparison with the empowered teams begins and ends. Feature Teams operate from a list (they call it a backlog), break the more significant tasks into smaller ones, perform quality testing, and release. You may say, what’s wrong with it? A lot, especially the starting point.
They own the delivery and not the definition of the problem. They may do some product discovery but not with any rigor. The result is they become a feature factory. Keep churning the stuff (in the name of agile, kanban, SAFe), and satisfy their senior leaders who keep the score of what you said you would deliver regardless of whether you made any customer traction.
In strong product teams:
Your teams are genuinely empowered to explore both the problem and the solution. They validate whether the problem is a real one that can move the needle with the customer's needs. By how? By making the customer your center of the universe. How many product teams interact with the customers meaningfully, meaningfully being the keyword. A meaningful interaction for product discovery is not about “tell me your pain points, and I’ll go build stuff.” You ought to be skilled in extracting the nuggets of the customers’ unmet needs. Teams that are empowered in strong product cultures have nailed it.
They have solid practices of stakeholder management—stakeholders = who have skin in the game. Read Sales, Marketing, and all go-to-market partners. Despite the bad press, these stakeholders are your partners. Collectively, you can make a dent. They have a lot riding on the product capabilities that you are bringing to life. However, be careful how you bring items to the top of the funnel. Your stakeholders have reasons to ask for features but rarely have the skills or data to decide which feature to work on or discard. In a strong product culture, the product teams look at each ask dispassionately and explore it with utmost curiosity. For the items they pursue, they identify the target customers, interview them, identify the success measures, clearly call out their assumptions (and make every effort to validate them as quickly as possible in the product cycle).
Culture questions:
Is your product team accountable for the results — customer value and business outcome?
Do you measure the success based on how many features you release or story points you deliver?
Technology is not the end-all-be-all. It is a means, sure. But to what end? To solve your customer’s problems, and yet it works for your business. Pause. Read that statement and internalize it. Product teams with robust cultures have people, processes, and skills to synthesize the customers’ unmet needs. They deploy the best tech possible to make a difference in the marketplace.
I can go on for several volumes. These three items above are the foundations of your product culture. Not easy to get out of the traditional command-and-control shackles. But do everything toward the journey of building empowered teams. It’s well worth it!