The key to any Product-Led Transformation is ensuring that the right people, with the right skills, are empowered to solve your biggest problems. Paul Wissam explores some key steps Product Managers at all levels can take to ensure talent doesn’t throttle your progress.
Product Management is the accidental profession. People arrive in this domain from all walks of life, through a plethora of individual pathways, bringing a unique set of knowledge, skills, and experiences. It is this diversity that makes the product community so vibrant and rich. But to truly harness the power of the accidental profession, we need to complement this by being especially *intentional* with our talent selection, development and structure.
This is no easy task.
The biggest challenge for any organisation or product team is the struggle to uncover and nurture talent that will solve the right problems. By being deliberate and calculated in understanding these problems we can ensure that the right people, with the right skills, are empowered to solve them and ensure a laser-like focus on delivering customer value. Talent will be the driver of change within your product-led organisation — products don’t manage themselves. As a leader (or team member) Product Managers are responsible for creating the conditions for their teams to be successful. What can you do to maximize this?
Know
In week 1 of Season Pass, Adrienne Tan explored the idea of ‘knowing thy self’ as key to ‘The Product Rebellion’. A team is nothing more than a collection of selves with a (hopefully) shared goal. Collectively ‘knowing thy team’ is paramount to success, ensuring that the return on talent investment is maximised.
These same concepts of self-reflection apply equally to the broader team unit This allows you to effectively benchmark where you’re at, ensure that there is alignment on a shared vision, and to know each person’s unique strengths — and how to best deploy them. It also allows for more effective prioritisation decisions; your team’s strengths and weaknesses play into the selection of the problems you can tackle most effectively.
The Association Of Product Professionals’ Product Proficiency Framework provides a great starting point. The product management domain spans a huge breadth of skills; understanding your team’s capability in the four key quadrants and across the adaptive skills is crucial. Armed with this knowledge you can effectively map out your team’s current capabilities against the ideal state. Where are the gaps? What responsibilities does your team carry? What skills are needed to do this most effectively? Where is your group over or under-served?
Just as businesses often don’t spend sufficient time understanding customer problems, product leaders can fail to grasp and articulate the challenges within a team. This makes it difficult to solve them.
Build with Intention
Once we know our team we can begin to move forward with intention. There are multiple paths, but armed with a strong grasp of our collective self, team, and a vision of where you need to be, we can take a more systematic, cogent and intentional approach.
Stepping back and taking time to design your vision for the team is vital, and should be a collaborative effort with your key stakeholders. Get them all in a room (or Zoom) and get everyone on the same page. Have the difficult conversations, now, before you thrust someone into a role. Kate Leto’s Role Canvas provides an ideal starting point with some key questions: Why does this role exist? What outcomes will it be responsible for? What skills are essential to ensuring success in this role?
Going through this process ensures there’s clarity on purpose, accountabilities, and skills across the organisation. Whilst the next steps will not be easy, this process provides a clear path forward. Whether restructuring, upskilling, promoting from within, or hiring externally, an explicit and shared understanding of the role and the skills required will make things crystal clear for all involved.
It also helps navigate one of the most common mistakes made during team evolution; hiring clones. Beware the mirrortocracy. It’s an easy trap to fall into, but self-awareness will be your strongest asset here. Be aware of your own biases, and explicitly examine your own weaknesses (and your teams).. Hiring candidates with similar views, experience, and skills seems like a safe bet. I’m not saying it can’t work, but to truly maximise your ROI, it is important you are bringing in culture “adds”, not “fits”. How does a new team member supplement an existing gap? What do they add to your team? What different viewpoints and ways of looking at a problem can they bring?
Research consistently shows that this creates diversity of thought, and stronger teams with better ideas will have the ability to execute them more effectively — and do it with less resources.
The Goldilocks Zone
Nothing incredible ever happens in the comfort zone — here, teams stagnate, fail to take risks, and progress plateaus. But pushing too far outside will leave you floundering, feeling incapable and damaging your team’s credibility.
Carefully consider this when you’re planning your team. You need to ensure that the problems they will be tackling are challenging but not overwhelming or out of reach. It is a delicate balancing act, but one you must learn to perform as you nurture the next generation of product leaders within your organisation.
Conclusion
As you embark on your Product-Led Transformation a fostered sense of collective self-awareness will be essential in ensuring that the right people, with the right skills, are empowered to solve your biggest problems. Apply this self-awareness to build with intention, and once built, ensure continued development and growth by finding the Goldilocks Zone.
This is not easy. The road is not smooth. But actively taking steps to holistically understand your team, and being intentional in the way you address the challenges ahead, will be critical as you create the conditions for you and your team to succeed — and evoke lasting change.