Skills
The 'Skills' element of Product Team management focuses on identifying, developing, and leveraging the specific capabilities and competencies that are crucial for a product's success. It encompasses a broad range of practices aimed at nurturing the talent within the aligned Stream Teams and aligning skills with strategic objectives.
How AI changes skill development
AI compresses the work that used to fill the bottom rungs of the career ladder: boilerplate code, first-draft research summaries, surface-level competitive analysis. The traditional path of "junior gets the easy work, learns by doing it, gradually takes on harder work" no longer compounds the same way, because the easy work is now done by AI in seconds.
This has two implications for how Product Teams approach skill development:
- The questions that define a person's stage have shifted. Career stages are now defined less by which tasks you can complete unsupervised and more by which judgment calls you can make: what to investigate, when to push back, what to invest in, when to stop. Performance levels and career paths should reflect this.
- Apprenticeship and pairing matter more, not less. When AI does the routine work, the skill-building loop has to come from somewhere else: exposure to senior judgment in real situations, through teaming, apprenticeship programs, and active coaching. Teams that lean only on AI for output without putting comparable effort into skill development will hit a ceiling within a year or two as their senior people move on.
Principles and Practices
Effectiveness
| Principles | Description | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| It’s hard to get better if you don’t know what better looks like | We need to ensure that people are clear on the expectations for their role as well as the general company values and principles. | By defining job specifications which clearly the expected performance and behaviour we can remove unnecessary conversations around expectations and focus on improvements. |
| "You cannot be a good manager without being a good coach" - Bill Campbell | We need to help our people to work as effectively and efficiently as they can. | By actively coaching employees with continuous feedback we can help them to achieve the desired performance. |
| Coaching is a conversation | We need to uncover the root cause of issues to be able to most effectively solve them. | By training coaches to ask questions and actively listening to responses we can more effectively help coachees to uncover and address problems to improve performance. |
| The manager often knows the least about a person's performance | We need to actively gather first-hand insights or gather feedback directly from the people that the person is working with. | By observing teams in action and actively gathering peer feedback we can capture real examples of where a person can improve. |
| Practical experience is the best teacher | We need to ensure that people have the opportunity to learn by doing. | By running apprenticeship programs we can help people to learn by doing and by observing others. |
| The world is full of experienced beginners | We need to reflect on our experiences to identify the patterns, increase our repertoire of solutions and improve our decision-making. | By having regular one-on-one meetings we can help people to reflect on their performance and create career development plans to address the most pressing issues. |
| Knowledge exists outside of the company | We need to ensure that people can get the best training that they need. | By allocating training budgets people can find the best solutions for their needs. |
Efficiency
| Principles | Description | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| Skills drive performance. | A Stream Team's capability to execute efficiently on its objectives hinges on the skills and expertise of its members. | By establishing capability standards and identifying gaps in the skillset we can understand where we need to focus our training efforts. |
Sustainability
| Principles | Description | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| People leave teams | We need to minimise the amount of knowledge lost when people leave the team. | By promoting internal knowledge sharing and rotating people across teams we can distribute knowledge more effectively across the organisation. |
| Knowledge drives sustainable innovation | We need to ensure that our teams know about the business, customers but also the latest technologies that may be just now available that can help us to deliver better products. | By running regular innovation days we can help people to learn about new technologies and how they can be applied to our products. |
Criticisms
| Criticism | Description | Mitigation Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Skill Obsolescence | The rapid pace of change can quickly render specific skills obsolete. | Emphasise learning agility and the development of adaptable, transferable skills. |
| One-Size-Fits-All Approach | Standardised training programs may not meet the diverse needs of all employees. | Customise development programs to align with individual career aspirations and capabilities. |
Anti-Patterns
- Current Skills Focus: Focusing solely on current skills without considering future competencies required for strategic goals.
- Technical Skills Bias: Neglecting soft skills development in favour of technical skills only.
- Feedback Neglect: Underutilising employee feedback in shaping learning and development initiatives.
- Leadership Oversight: Overlooking the role of leadership in modeling a learning culture.