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Product Teams: Benefits and Challenges
A product team is a group of people who collaborate effectively, have ownership of a product, and are responsible for achieving product success. Product teams have become popular for a good reason: “None of us is as smart as all of us,” as Ken Blanchard once put it. In other words, it is very difficult for a product person to make all decisions by themselves, even if they are very experienced.[1]
What’s more, product people rely on others to help them progress their products. This includes UX designers, developers, and testers, as well as marketers, sales reps, and customer support team members: They design, build, market, sell, and support the products. Bringing the right people together allows you to leverage their collective expertise, make the best possible decisions, and create alignment.[2]
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for product teams to struggle. I’ve met teams who lacked the right team members and skills, were not empowered to effectively progress their products, and suffered from frequent changes to the team composition, to name just a few issues. Consequently, their products had a weak value proposition, offered a poor user experience, and didn’t generate the desired business benefits. In sum, the teams and their products underperformed.
A common leadership response is to offer coaching—trying to help the team perform better—and, in some cases, start managing the team. Despite being well-intended, this can hurt morale and further hamper productivity. Additionally, it can leave the leader exhausted and overworked. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The 60-30-10 Rule
Research by the late Harvard professor J. Richard Hackman suggests that the biggest impact on a team’s performance derives from its design, not from real-time coaching interventions.[3] This insight is captured by the 60-30-10 rule shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1 distinguishes three ways in which the performance of product teams can be affected: team design, team launch, and team coaching. The biggest influence on team performance, about 60%, is the team’s design, according to Hackman. This includes ensuring that the right people join the product team, that the team’s goals and authority are clear, and that the team receives the right support from the organisation, as I explain in more detail in the next section.
The second biggest influence comes from the team launch, roughly 30%. This includes helping the team members bond and establishing shared ways of working. Team coaching, finally, has a comparatively small impact on team performance, about 10% according to Hackman. This does not mean that it is unimportant. The opposite is true. Product teams can greatly benefit from having a qualified coach.[4]
But developing a team is like growing a plant: If it’s been put in the wrong place, if the requirements for growth are not met, then you can water and fertilise it as much as you want. It may never fully develop. In the worst case, it will wither and die.
Team Design
The team design comprises the necessary prep work for having a great team.[5] This includes answering the following set of questions.
- What are the team’s purpose and goals? What are its responsibilities? What level of empowerment is required?
- Which roles and skills, both task-oriented and social, are required to meet the goals and fulfil the responsibilities? Who should join the team?[6]
- Which support does the team need from the organisation? Who is the (executive) sponsor? Who is the team coach?
- Which tools and environment does the team require? Does the team need a team room or other facilities?
The questions above are a subset of a comprehensive questionnaire I have developed to help you get the team design right. You can download it by clicking on Figure 2.
While you have to, of course, determine which team design is right for you, I generally recommend forming product teams that contain the person in charge of a product, a UX designer, architect/programmer, and tester, as well as key business stakeholders, like a marketer and sales rep, and a team coach. I also advocate empowering product teams to make strategic product decisions, as I explain in more detail in the article Building High-Performing Product Teams.
Getting the team design right can be tricky, as you might lack the authority to establish all enabling conditions—to determine the team’s purpose, choose the members, ensure the necessary organisational support, and so on. You may therefore have to influence senior management and peers so you can provide the team with what it needs to perform well. To achieve this, you’ll benefit from strengthening your emergent/lateral leadership skills, as I explain in the article Decoding Product Leadership.
Team Launch
As important as it is, designing the team is not enough. To help product teams succeed, you also have to get the team launch right. You’d be forgiven to think that the launch essentially consists of the kick-off meeting. But that’s not correct. “By the end of a successful launch, a team will have evolved from being just a list of names into a real (…) team. [Its] members will have begun developing and testing the norms of conduct that will guide team behavior,” writes Hackman in his book Collaborative Intelligence, p. 159.
To understand what the team launch might involve, we can correlate it with the team development stages suggested by the Tuckman model in Figure 3.
The model in Figure 3 shows that teams usually have to go through a Forming and Storming stage before they can become a real team: In the Norming stage, the group has started to jell. Its members empathise with and trust each other, they follow shared ways of working, and they start to collaborate effectively. The fourth stage in Figure 3 is called Performing. As its name indicates, the team is now productive and does a great job at working towards its goals.[7]
The team launch—based on my understanding of Hackman’s work—comprises the Forming and Storming and the beginning of the Norming stage of the Tuckman model, marked by the grey area in Figure 3. Unlike a product launch, it’s therefore not an event but a process, which might last from several weeks to a few months.
To understand if the launch of a product team was successful, ask yourself the following questions.
- Do the members support the team’s purpose and goals? Do they understand the team’s responsibilities and authority? Are the members clear on their roles?
- Do they feel psychologically safe? Do they respect and trust each other? Has the team jelled?
- Have the individuals started to collaborate successfully? Do they meet regularly, and are the meetings effective?
- Have the team members established shared processes and tools? Do they use them?
Team Coaching
The last activity group in Hackman’s 60-30-10 rule is ongoing coaching.[8] This includes the following five activities:
- Strengthening relationships, communicating and collaborating effectively.
- Leveraging collaborative decision-making.
- Constructively dealing with conflict.
- Helping the team develop a growth mindset and learning new skills.
- Continuously improving team performance, processes, and tools.
- Practising sustainable pace, staying healthy and motivated.
But as mentioned before, if the team was not well designed or the launch was not successful, coaching is unlikely to be effective. The following story illustrates this. I once worked with a team that continued to underperform despite my best coaching efforts. After admitting to myself that more coaching was not the solution, I realised that the team setup was ill-conceived. This was not an easy step, as I was the manager in charge and had designed the team myself. I called a meeting with the members, and we agreed to break up the team and form two new groups. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending: The new teams performed much better than the original one.
Having said this, I would like to reiterate that product teams benefit from having a qualified coach available who carries out the activities listed above. You should therefore do everything you can to plan for a coach role during team design and have the individual on board when the team is launched.
Notes
[1] Marty Cagan’s book Inspired and Steve Haines’ The Product Manager’s Desk Reference have helped popularise product teams.
[2] A product team, therefore, is a cross-functional group.
[3] See J. Richard Hackman, Collaborative Intelligence and Ruth Wageman, “The Team Diagnostic Survey and the 60-30-10 Rule for Coaching Teams.” Thanks to Arne Roock for making me aware of the rule.
[4] Note that the percentages indicate the importance of the three groups of activities. In this sense, Hackman’s 60-30-10 rule is a guideline rather than a hard-and-fast rule. Also, more recent research into teams at Google found that how the teams worked together was more important than who was on the team. This does not invalidate the importance of team design in my mind. But it challenges the percentages suggested by Hackman, assuming that Google’s findings are generally applicable.
[5] Hackman suggests in his book Collaborative Intelligence that effective teams must fulfil six conditions: Real Team (social system, clear boundaries, collective accountability, and at least moderate stability), Compelling Purpose, Right People, Clear Norms of Conduct, and Team-focused Coaching. I address the conditions in this section apart from the norms of conduct, which I discuss in the section Team Launch.
[6] The GRPI model, developed in the early 1970s by Richard Beckard, also views clear goals and roles as crucial for effective teamwork.
[7] Note that Tuckman later added a fifth stage called Adjourning. I’m not showing the stage in Figure 3, as it is not particularly relevant to the discussion.
[8] Hackman and Wageman define team coaching as “direct interaction with a team intended to help its members make coordinated and task-appropriate use of their collective resources in accomplishing the team’s work” in “A Theory of Team Coaching,” Academy of Management Review, 2005, Vol. 30, No. 2, p. 269.
