FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: CULTURE
Building a strong and effective product culture
Product culture is about excellence in product discovery and delivery. It can be quite obvious when you are at a workplace with a strong product culture and when not. In short, product teams with an amazing product culture have high levels of innovation and development velocities.
The successful discovery of great products is about product teams and techniques that manifest within the product culture of the product organization. In essence, effective product culture can be measured along two dimensions:
- Product discovery: this is all about continuously and consistently innovating with valuable solutions for customers. This is generally referred to as the “innovation culture”
- Product delivery: this is about consistently managing to ship stable and working solutions to customers. This is generally referred to as the “execution culture”
The key themes associated with an effective innovation culture include:
- Having a culture of openness to experimentation
- Having open minds to seek new solutions
- Seeking and granting empowerment and accountability in customer and product discovery
- Having a deep understanding of technology and its tools
- Being business-minded and customer-centered or customer-obsessed
- Building teams with diversity in skill sets and backgrounds across product, design, and engineering
- Continuously learning about product discovery techniques to quickly test ideas
The key themes associated with an effective execution culture entail:
- Having a sense of urgency, just like in a wartime
- Making commitments with high-integrity
- Seeking and granting empowerment and accountability in product delivery
- Understanding the importance of collaboration and being collaborative
- Being business results-driven and not output-oriented
- Having a system of celebration, recognition, and rewards in place
While some companies are great in product discovery, others excel in delivery. However, the companies that we all revere and love are those that excel on both fronts such as Amazon, Apple, and Google.
What it feels like to have a great product culture?
To have an effectively functioning product team, we need an environment that allows people to flourish. To get a feeling of how a successful product team should function, below is a checklist. This can be a quick gauging tool to see where your team sits in its quality of product team culture.
In short, a good product team culture is one where:
- Members are on a mission to solve a significant customer pain
- Have OKRs in place to have autonomy and be held accountable
- Understand their partners’ and business constraints and build solutions within those constraints
- Understand the meaning and definition of experimentation in practice and have operational excellence in quickly testing ideas
- Have abundant customer insights and analytics to make product decisions
- Have the necessary skills and the right environment to collaborate cross-functionally to deliver solutions that customers will love
When the product culture in an organization is weak, we tend to see a drop in innovation and reduced velocity of delivery. It’s important for product leaders and teams to diagnose the problem and aim to ratify it while acknowledging that not all problems can be fixed and will have structural causes. In this case, it might be the time to think of a new workplace where the culture fits your ambitions and desires.
Weak product culture: lack of innovative output
Product teams should repeatedly deliver value to the business through consistent experimentation and sticky (or innovative) breakthroughs. As organizations scale, most often, they lose their innovative agility which results in declining levels of motivation where most team members eventually leave for startups or leaner companies where they perceive or feel they are adding value to the business.
The drivers of this loss of innovation are many and are driven by the organization’s culture. Here are some cultural attributes that lead to the loss of agile innovation at scale.
Issues with product vision, strategy, and objectives
- Void of meaningful product vision: at scale, organizations have mainly fulfilled their ambitions, and key members have left the business. This is the time for a new CPO (or CEO) to draw the deliver the vision for the next 5–10 years to bring ambition to the organization.
- Lack of strategic focus: every product needs to be targeted at a single market/customer segment at a time. Targeting all segments at once results in a lack of commercial innovation.
- Risk aversion: as companies scale and go public, the role of the executive committee becomes managing risks and the public investment community and forgo investing with courage into the next waves of innovative experiments.
Underpar operational and execution performance
- Little product mindset: with a product mindset, the goal is to serve the customers’ needs, and hence the product managers are the CEOs of their products. With an IT mindset, the product team exists to support the business. With the former, you get innovation, with the latter support.
- Lacking customer-centricity: organizations that lack direct contact and feedback loops from customers lose their source of inspiration and decline in levels of innovative output
- Low degrees of empowerment: this can be felt when teams are pinned down to delivering what is on their roadmap over tackling business problems and finding solutions for them
- Bogged down with keeping the lights on: when you find your team’s efforts are mainly focused on fixing bugs, enhancing capabilities and technologies, addressing technical debt, etc., then you don’t have the time to innovate. This happens when product teams lack strategic focus and are underresourced
Challenges related to teams and collaboration
- Lacking strong product managers: at many established organizations project managers or technical leads at times take on the role of the product manager and many times they are unable to recruit amazing product talent
- Unstable product teams: with high turnovers across product teams (i.e., engineers, PMs, delivery managers, etc.), teams rarely have the chance to learn their ecosystem together, and hence innovation suffers
- Communication silos: for example, with engineers only focused on delivery and not part of the discovery phase, innovation suffers. It’s crucial to have all team members in the discovery and delivery pipeline
Weak product culture: slow throughput
Throughput, velocity, or development rate are the same terms here
As organizations scale, while avoidable, they tend to slow down. Product development slowdown can be driven by several factors including the following common ones:
Issues related to product vision, strategy, and objectives
- Void of product vision: as discussed previously, this is the starting ground for product teams’ to find mission-driven purpose, otherwise, development speed will suffer
- Lack of product vision breakdown: product vision and strategy need to be translated into smaller and finer pieces or milestones for teams to work on. Leaving vision at 50,000 feet will create confusion among teams and decelerate execution
- Changing objectives and priorities: rapidly shifting objectives will significantly increase employee churn rates and reduce morale and development throughput
Undepar operational and execution performance
- Technical debt: with the changing landscape and increasing consumer and competitive pressures, product architectures will fall short, and technical debt will pile up. It’s important to review
- Inadequate delivery/project management: delivery/project management’s goal is to resolve dependencies and impediments that may grow exponentially. Without a dedicated person to chase those impediments down, they may never be resolved
- Infrequent release cycles: in an ideal scenario teams should release products every sprint. To achieve this goal, test and release automation will play a major role
- Buy-in culture: organizations at scale require consensus on every decision due to a lack of team empowerment and strong product managers. This in effect will reduce development velocity and organizational throughput
Challenges related to teams and collaboration
- Lack of durable teams: with teams across multiple locations and outsourced engineering teams, simple communication and development velocity will suffer. Product teams need to build a sense of purpose and collaborate towards goals that require conjointed efforts to deliver value
- Little involvement of design and engineering in the discovery phases: designers and engineers can help with customer discovery and ratify feasibility early on and consequentially, product discovery and delivery can realize increased velocities
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