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.
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.