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Leading a Thriving Product Team

Let’s clear one thing up. A Product Manager is not the CEO of a product, if for no other reason than Product Managers rarely have any authority over the people on a product team. If you want an effective relationship with the other members of your product team, you have to lead through influence. Here are some perspectives on how you can lead through influence and a couple of stories by people who have seen success when they weren’t in a position of authority.

How to set up and lead a great product development team. George Krasadakis believes that a great, shared purpose and bold vision powers successful product teams. You need an inspired, talented team to believe in your product vision and work with passion towards your shared goal. While setting up this inspired, talented product development team is not a simple task, George explains how you can succeed when you combine the right skills, characters, and culture.
(via @gkrasadakis)

How to Lead a Product Team With Context. Everyone hates old school, micromanaging bosses, who tell people what to do and how. Today there is a new school of leadership emerging to remove this frustration. It’s called empowering leadership. This leadership style encourages leaders to give freedom and responsibility to people and stop controlling and micromanaging them. If done right, empowering leadership can free up a lot of time for managers. In empowered teams, people can figure out what needs to be done and then do it in exceptional quality and in a reasonable timeframe. It’s difficult to switch to this leadership style, even with the best intention in mind. Dávid Pásztor explains how you can use context to empower their teams. 
(via @uxstudio)

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Are you ready for the tablets?

As a Product Manager, you probably already “have an app for that.” Even if you don’t, it’s become increasingly important to make sure that most products created today are just as easy to use on mobile devices than they are on the desktop – most people today access the internet on the computers that are inside their skinny jeans rather than the ones inside of their backpack.

But what about tablets?

Today, tablets are responsible for just 3.3% of internet usage. But that may very well change soon. Google is making very big investments in the tablet space once again and sees a future where tablet usage ramps up.  

As product people, what does this mean for us?

Maybe nothing quite yet, but it’s something to keep an eye on. If that bet turns into a trend, there are definitely certain user experience issues we’ll want to be mindful of:

• People tend to have longer sessions on their tablets. While a mobile device is usually a quick interaction, users typically stretch their experience out on a tablet.
• Tablets can do a whole lot more. It makes sense to keep the mobile version of your product slimmed down. But the processing power on tablets allows you to do a lot more. 
• People interact differently on a tablet. Mobile devices are small enough that they’re mostly used in portrait mode and navigated with a thumb. Not so for tablets. You can flip it to the side and get both thumbs involved. It's an entirely different experience.

Tablets are nothing new – and we’ve probably all had to be mindful of our product’s usage on these devices. But if one of the biggest companies in the world is making such a big bet on their usage climbing, it’s probably fair to expect they’ll become more and more relevant for us all. 

Latest Slack Activity

What's your deepest insight about teamwork? According to Gibson Biddle, teamwork is about knowing and playing your position to deliver results. Teamwork is not about getting along with others or building consensus. Effective teamwork requires healthy debate. Gibson describes effective teamwork as the coordinated, efficient action of a group of people to deliver results. Rather than require folks to get along, high-performance teams depend on team members who ask hard questions and actively point out when they disagree with each other.  Read on to see how to define your position, avoid the need to involve too many people in a decision, and farm for dissent to have more effective teamwork.
(via @gibsonbiddle)

How to lead a team by principles rather than process. Shane Close believes that there is no one-size-fits-all process that can create, foster, and grow high-functioning teams. Mostly, because every team is unique and team needs differ. In Shane’s experience, applying guiding principles to build and manage teams effectively yields far better and more consistent results than attempting to apply a single generic process that is measurable via a checklist or scorecard.
(via @uxdesigncc)

How to recover really quickly from failing really slowly. Najla Elmachtoub shares how her team at Etsy recovered from failing really slowly. They launched a high-profile product that didn’t meet customer needs after a nine-month waterfall build-out, and senior leadership decided that they needed to rethink our approach from the ground up. The team agreed to pivot the product over a three-month timeline. Najla’s team was demoralized that they had to throw out a lot of their work, and they were just plain tired. Here’s how Najla and her team set themselves up for success in this rapid pivot.
(via @theleaddev)

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