Building Great Product Teams: Notes From the Underground
By: Lauren Barrett
Tags: Technology, Startup, Software Development, Product Management, Teamwork

Building Great Product Teams: Notes From the Underground

Great product teams make great products. They’re not your average teams.

I’ve been a part of phenomenal teams and I’ve been a part of teams that have had many, many opportunities. I’ve been on teams navigating a now failed startup, on ones jet-setting and consulting globally for high profile clients (hello late-night coffee journeys in Zurich!), and most recently, on ones embedded within a very large organization.

I’ll start with the obvious and non-bleeding edge: a team and its products is a mini-ecosystem. (I swear, it gets better than this.)

One of my favorite human-made ecosystems 👏🏽

This doesn’t mean there are A players and B players, and we certainly shouldn’t subscribe to the idea that there can’t be many star players on a team, it’s outside of that framework. No one is starting and no one is benched. What this means is that everyone has a wealth of skillsets they bring to the team to bring something to life. And they’re all interconnected. The most high-level way we start to do this is the concept of roles. Someone codes, someones tests, someone user researches, someone designs, someone story-tells, and so on. It’s an easy way to create a team formula. And it’s not a bad start. It’s digestible, actionable, and most of the tech industry is ok with it. Because it works well, to an extent.

But the foundational aspect here is it simply creates a product team, a working, functional team — not necessarily a great team.

Great product teams are built with grit. It definitely starts with the individuals, and includes both role-based skills and other skills, but there are qualities at the team level we should be nurturing.

Note 1: a great product team has a goal

Whatever color Kool-Aid or level of fidelity this may be, it has to exist. And you have to all be there for it.

Some of the best teams I’ve been on have had the clearest goals, whether it’s — and here are some fuzzy examples — to get something to market in the next eight weeks, to improve best product practices for a client, to move to continuous delivery, to increase conversion by 4%, and so on. This doesn’t mean everyone won’t have their own goals, and I think it’s healthy and necessary everyone does because these are shorter-term motivators and bring us additional joy and satisfaction in our work. Maybe someone wants to learn a new and emerging language or testing framework, or someone else wants to improve their storytelling or public speaking. All ok. But the thread that ties everyone together to make a group of people a team, is the overarching goal.

Designed by Lillen.

And what makes a great product team in this regard, is that the “great” differentiator can start to emerge when everyone on the team is actually bought into the same goal. Otherwise it’s just a group of people working on a set of features perhaps peripherally related to a slide someone presented in a leadership meeting awhile ago.

Note 2: a great product team is empowered

The team holistically has the skillsets, accountability, ownership, and tools or means to achieve their goal. Often with lots of creativity.

On all product teams, teams build features and own getting a solution out into production. Check. Not writing home about this.

On great product teams, teams own the problems, the prioritization of those problems, and the solution. Which means they’re empowered to 1) choose which problems to solve, and 2) solve the problems however they want to.

This gives rise to a few valuable non-role specific skillsets to look out for when building a great product team. I’ve personally found that high levels of curiosity, ability to effectively navigate ambiguity, ability to make decisions without all the information, and an understanding of short and long-term tradeoffs are some of the most critical ones to help a team thrive and become empowered. (Let’s assume an organization has not already disempowered a product team; this is really another discussion on product leadership.)

When building out my own teams, a common interview question I will almost always ask is some form of “What are you most excited to learn or take on in the next year that you don’t know how to do now?” Occasionally you get a downer response of “oh, putting into practice what I’ve learned…” But if you’re wanting to build a great product team, this response won’t cut it. One of the best hires I’ve ever made, her face lit up when I asked her this question. She rattled off a list of all things she wanted to do that she hasn’t done yet and what she wants to learn and where she wants to go. The light was fully on. And that indicates to me two distinct qualities: that she is curious as hell, and that she has a solid understanding of what she knows and what she doesn’t and where that universe of growth is waiting for her. It’s one of the most exciting things to see when building a great product team.

People with these qualities drive a team to shift from simply delivering to delivering the right thing. And that’s a requirement of great product teams.

Note 3: a great product team embodies a set of *desirable* values

Values exist, and everyone on the team shares them. And they use those values to achieve their goal given they are empowered to do so, in a way that feels right to them.

A product team’s values could be transparency, integrity, collaboration, bringing your authentic self to work and allowing others to do the same, challenging ideas and not people, and so much more. We may all have different ways of manifesting these but our values need to be aligned. Granted you can have teams that share somewhat undesirable values, but let’s assume we’re shooting for the stars here.

I’ve really found this to be team-critical, and another huge differentiator between an average team and a great product team. Fluffy as it may be, IMO shared values is the most important thing in building great product teams. A difference in values is a complete crack in the boat. Think about your own team: Does someone value predictability? Moving up the company ladder? Calling out when the team isn’t building the right thing? Always being right? Taking time to upskill someone else on the team? What does the team value as a whole? All these values and manifestations of values create culture. The culture we nurture by doing, the culture we allow to thrive by not doing. (If this is not clear from oh, let’s say life, then yes, inaction has an impact just like action.) Thus, everyone owns their own culture-add.

I’ve been a part of teams that have shared values and it’s been unstoppable. (You know who you are!) I’ve also been a part of teams that did not share a set of desired values and wow, what a showstopper. Talk about non-thriving. The teams were empowered to… barely keep our heads above water.

We need to value creating a safe space for everyone to challenge everything (let the best idea win!), and to allow people to bring their full, authentic selves to the team.

When you’re looking to build a great product team, focus on the values a person brings and how it will affect the overall set of values the team embodies. Skill sets can be complementary but values should be aligned. Given a desirable set of values, it could even move beyond a great team to ensure your team is built in a way that it will continue to grow and the products will grow with it. Instead of reinforcing the same norms and predictable feedback loops through an outdated culture-fit, teams anchored in shared values will be able to grow and produce a few years from now in a way they never even imagined was possible today. And that’s exciting. These mini ecosystems of teams are breathing, growing things.

And to wrap it up, team values was described to me the other day by a partner at a VC firm, as “enough of both collaboration and contradiction to make a pearl.” Brilliant.

Thanks for reading.