The X-Factor of an Outstanding Product Team
Many organisations today are facing continual disruption and have the challenge of keeping pace with the rapid evolution of technology and people’s behaviour.
What the most creative and innovative organisations are doing to better build, launch and manage products that get and keep more customers in increasing uncertainty is to create a problem-solving team behaviour.
It’s about sensing uncertainty and understanding which questions we need to answer before diving into building. Learnings are the foundation. The more you know about your users, product, and channels the better you become at designing solutions that influence growth.
However, it isn’t enough to just learn. The purpose of a team is to have an impact on growth. Impact starts with identifying the biggest problem or area of opportunity by using quantitative and qualitative data.
Intuition also plays an important role when coming up with possible solutions or initiatives. Usually, the best insights come from the intersection of quantitative data, qualitative data, and intuition.
What effectively causes a product team to have a problem-solving behaviour? And, is that enough to create outstanding performance? Is finding the right balance between functional characteristics and psychological synergy the key?
Functional Characteristics
The ideal functional characteristics of a product team has been around in the digital industry for some years already — small (5–9 people), long-term allocated, cross-functional with end-to-end capabilities (product management, software engineering, customer experience design, growth hacking, community building), and senior level leadership.
The need for autonomy and ownership is also not new — the idea of having a self-organising team has been very popular.
However, there is a big difference between giving autonomy to a group of people and effectively having them perform as a self-organising team. Actually, that’s one of the biggest challenges, especially in traditional corporate environments.
Psychological Synergy
Usually, organisations restrict their focus to hiring professionals with advanced technical skills and hope that good team performance somehow follows. It is just recently that the digital community has started to realise that the psychological synergy of a team is the x-factor of high performance.
Things started to get interesting when I watched a hangout on a study about the key factors that make an effective team by the People Analytics Team at Google. According to their conclusions, there are five main elements that effectively cause high performance:
- Psychological Safety — team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other
- Dependability — team members get things done on time and meet Google’s high bar for excellence
- Structure & Clarity — the team has clear roles, plans, and goals
- Meaning — work is personally important to team members
- Impact — team members think their work matters and creates change
Other elements, for example individual skills, the size of the team and co-location, which before the study were considered vital, proved to have not much correlation with making a high performance team. The dynamic which proved to cause the biggest impact by far was Psychological Safety.
What does that actually mean? Remember the last time you were working in a team. Did you feel like you could ask anything without the risk of being perceived as the only one out of the loop, or who criticise too much, or who doesn’t have a basic skill? It’s probably not difficult to remember many situations like that.
According to the Google team’s conclusion — “Turns out, we’re all reluctant to engage in behaviors that could negatively influence how others perceive our competence, awareness, and positivity. Although this kind of self-protection is a natural strategy in the workplace, it is detrimental to effective teamwork. On the flip side, the safer team members feel with one another, the more likely they are to admit mistakes, to partner, and to take on new roles. And it affects pretty much every important dimension we look at for employees. Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.”
When I heard that I was instantly hooked. For someone who has been working in the trenches for so many years, it resonated like music. I have been intuitively focusing on creating psychological safety with teams throughout my 17 years working in the digital space. It immediately made me remember thousands of personal situations.
For example, in a recent digital transformation that I co-lead in a large organisation. One of my main responsibilities was to build an ideal product team from scratch, which would be an example for all the other teams as the new way to operate.
The context was a very traditional and conservative management culture, where the product teams were treated like an assembly. There was a lack of leadership capabilities, bad morale and resistance to change — the last time a business leader tried to implement a digital transformation he failed and was fired by the board.
I knew there would be a lot of work to be done and prioritisation would be critical. From day one, I made the decision to focus the majority of my attention on creating a safe environment and to incentivise courage within the team. I had to be the one who took the first steps in taking risks, but I also had to convince the business leader responsible for the transformation to prove to the team how safe they were.
But in that kind of circumstance, talking was not enough. It took me a lot of effort to create the right environment; almost every day was like a roller coaster of emotions — extreme variations in the morale of the group, situations of emotional pain, people fighting, etc. I have absolutely no doubt that what made this team succeed was our focus on creating psychological safety as the first goal.
Another situation the Google study made me remember was the first digital company I co-founded in 2000. As very passionate tech entrepreneurs, nothing was more cool for us than creating an environment of creative freedom and challenging the status quo of traditional business management.
Even paying 30% less than the average wage in the market, people absolutely loved working for us. We had many talented young tech professionals as part of the team from the beginning, and despite all the challenges and extensive working hours, friendship and camaraderie was always high.
The consequence was an outstanding team, which was actually the main reason why the company was later acquired. Some members of the team, who are the leaders of this organisation today, have been there for more than 15 years. Others who later left the company are today working for some of the best tech teams in the world.
When I finished watching the hangout hosted by the People Analytics Team at Google, I was absolutely in the flow. I ended up watching another two videos in the sequence, which together gave me the feeling of connecting the dots — I couldn’t stop saying to myself ‘F&ck!! That’s it!’
These two great videos — Building a psychologically safe workplace by Amy Edmondson, and Why good leaders make you feel safe by Simon Sinek — extend the team level and show us the huge impact that having a fearless team has on society as a whole.
In the first one, professor Amy Edmondson describes how creating a psychological comfort zone in which enables people to take risks is key to innovation. A leader must do three main things to create psychological safety in their workplace:
- Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution one. Recognise and make it explicit that there is enormous uncertainty ahead and enormous interdependency. The only way to win is to work as a team, where all the brains and voices have to be in the game.
- Acknowledge your own fallibility as a leader.
- Model curiosity — ask a lot of questions.
According to her, items 1 and 2 create the rationale for speaking up, while item 3 creates a necessity for voice.
In the second video, Simon Sinek brilliantly explains what makes great leaders. According to him, getting the team environment right is what makes every individual have the capacity to do remarkable things. That’s where leadership matters, because it is the leader who sets the tone.
Deep emotions are at the core of an outstanding team — the love and trust between individuals causes high performance cooperation. Sinek explains that the biggest challenge here is that these are feelings, not instructions. Where do they come from? As social animals, trust and cooperation are natural reactions that occur when we feel that we belong, that we are safe inside the team.
Outside “the tribe” there is just danger — for example, things that can frustrate our lives or reduce our chance of success, ups and downs in the economy, or a new disruptive technology that can make your business model obsolete overnight.
A leader knows these are forces we can’t control and the only variable we can control is the safe inner circle of the team. Great leaders inspire and guide the team by example. They would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers, they would sacrifice the numbers to save the people.
Isn’t that amazingly compelling? It sounds so obvious! How can these new discoveries be translated into real transformation?
Well, it turns out that some of the most simple things are the most challengeable. Honestly, 80% of the workplaces that I have experienced, both in traditional organisations and in modern startups, are very far from that ideal. The majority of leaders don’t seem to follow this idea of cultivating a psychologically safe workplace. And I don’t blame them.
However, it doesn’t mean that I am willing to accept that. If the impact of the leader is so vital in setting the tone of the environment, what can we do to have the right leadership behaviour?
I can bet that there are many great leaders who fit with these beliefs, who are hungry for change and who are already working hard to make it happen. There has never been a better moment to join forces! Ask yourself right now, what can I do to help?
I have been hearing excuses almost everyday — “we need to be pragmatic”. WTF does that mean, mate?! I will tell you what it means — it means accept the circumstance as it is, fit in and be quiet. Every time I hear that it acts as a trigger for me to do the opposite!
It’s time to lead, not follow! Stop saying that you would like a better workplace, do something! Everyone can help. It doesn’t matter if you are a team leader, a mid-level manager, a c-level executive, the owner, or just the consumer. You can start influencing and inspiring people right now.
If you profoundly believe, stop faking it. Be the first to take the risk! Be your true self and lead the change! That’s what makes a great leader.
