Building empowered product teams begins with hiring the right talent and retaining them. Furthermore, staffing the product team is the end-to-end and sole responsibility of the product leader and not the HR department. For a product leader to succeed with staffing, he/she needs to: 1. Find competent characters 2. Continuously be recruiting 3. Refrain from outsourcing 4. Learn to interview effectively 5. Hire efficiently and convincingly 6. Aim for collocation, and manage remote employees 7. Onboard new employees smoothly 8. Train new hires for maximum readiness 9. Excel in providing feedback and performance reviews 10. Terminate swiftly and with constructive convictions 11. Coach staff to promotion 12. Manage retention, but don’t take it personally

Team topology empowers teams, defines the scope of work, shapes the team composition, and sets boundaries — All product teams start somewhere, but when they become more than 15 engineers, communication, empowerment, autonomy, alignment, and decision-making efficiencies drop and the need to split teams and look for more effective team structures, topologies, and ways of working is felt. It’s the joint responsibility of various leaders across product…

Once a product vision and strategy are in place, product leaders need to execute the strategy and create value. To succeed with execution, there are 10 steps and principles that product leaders should consider: 1. Build your empowerment mindset 2. Provide ample strategic context 3. Set relevant ambitions for each objective 4. Assign objectives 5. Help teams construct Key Results 6. Align teams and KTLO 7. HICs are to be addressed 8. Improve collaboration via shared objectives 9. Actively manage teams 10. Hold teams accountable, but help them grow

Product strategy requires critical thinking and careful decision-making that brings focus built on valid insights, and acute execution to deliver any meaningful impact while remaining open and humble to pivots and change — A product leader’s role is to build empowered product teams and give them the space to solve meaningfully challenging problems. If such conditions are met, we can expect ordinary people to create extraordinary products as they will have focus and the opportunity to leverage their skills and talent.

Product leaders are responsible for their product vision and principles and every strong product vision will encompass seven core elements to succeed: 1. Brings customer centricity 2. Creates alignment 3. Sets scope of work 4. Leverages megatrends 5. Enables persuasion 6. Empowers teams 7. Drives team topology — Ownership The head of product is responsible for delivering the product vision and strategy. To act on this:

Because Product Managers need to collaborate with a multitude of people including the product design team, engineering team, product marketing, delivery management, and other support roles such as data analysts, it’s crucial to understand their scope of responsibilities and priorities to better work with them. Furthermore, Product Managers interact with the Product Leadership Team across Product Management, Design, and Technology and they need to align expectations appropriately and based on what each leadership team will be accountable for.

To manage several product teams at scale and large organizations, it’s not enough to work with the core principles of product management and think that you’ve done enough to succeed. Success at scale requires proactive stakeholder management and communication of learnings. — As organizations scale, cumbersome structures, rules, and procedures that impede innovation and rapid experimentation tend to take over. These are mainly put in place to minimize risks at the operational level. To help deliver product agility and discovery, great product managers need to:

Transformation of traditional and risk-averse organizations is a daunting task and product teams can play a massive role in this transformation. To achieve this, product teams need to acquaint their organizations with new modes of product discovery through weekly Discovery Sprints, launch pilot initiatives, and move away from roadmaps that are output focused. — Moving from a mercenary-style and business support unit of a product team that is mainly output-focused with long-term product roadmaps that outline what needs to be done over the next 12 months to a product unit that is empowered, accountable, and driven by business results is a major cultural shift…