Style
The 'Style' element of Product Team management focuses on the different leadership styles that managers can adopt to motivate, guide, and support their teams effectively. The leadership style of a manager can have a significant impact on team performance, engagement, and culture.
Principles and Practices
Effectiveness
| Principle | Context | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| Information is the life blood of organisations | We need to ensure that information is shared effectively and efficiently | By encouraging open communication and transparency, avoiding silos and positioning failures as learning opportunities, we can foster a culture of trust and collaboration. |
| Accountability with authority | We need to ensure that teams have the autonomy to make decisions so that they can take ownership of the outcomes of their work. | By empowering teams to make decisions and removing all of the blocking dependencies that prevent them from releasing their product, we can increase shared accountability and motivation. |
| No risk, no reward | We need to ensure that people feel comfortable taking the risks required to achieve the targets. | By positioning the product development process as a series of experiments and learning opportunities, we can create a culture that encourages innovation and risk-taking. |
| Intelligence is distributed, information is not | We need to ensure that the team closest to the customer is able to make decisions quickly and effectively. | By empowering teams to make decisions based on customer feedback and data, we can increase the speed and quality of decision-making. By implementing regular reviews we ensure that we are delegating and not abdicating. |
| To go fast, go alone. To go far, go together | We need to ensure that we have multiple teams all working towards the same goal. | By creating a shared vision and strategy, and aligning teams around common objectives, we can foster collaboration and alignment across the organisation while maintaining autonomy and accountability at the team level. |
| When you are tired of repeating the message it is just started to set in | We need to ensure that the vision, strategy and principles are internalised by everyone on the team | By continually re-iterating the message at every opportunity you can ensure that people will start to hear it and internalise it. |
Efficiency
| Principle | Context | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| Collaboration is expensive | We need to minimise the need to collaborate across teams to avoid bottlenecks and inefficiencies. | By defining clear interaction modes for teams and implementing a culture of written communication, we can reduce the need for synchronous collaboration and increase the speed and quality of decision-making. |
Sustainability
| Principle | Context | Practice |
|---|---|---|
| The best leverage is unblocking teams | We need to ensure that Stream Teams can deliver efficiently and autonomously to hold them accountable for outcomes. | By removing all of the blocking dependencies that prevent teams from releasing their product, we can increase the speed and quality of decision-making and increase shared accountability and motivation. |
Criticisms
| Criticism | Description | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Excessive Autonomy | While empowering teams, too much autonomy without proper checks can lead to misalignment with overall business objectives. | Establish regular check-ins and strategic alignment sessions to ensure decisions are in line with company goals. |
| Lack of Focus | Teams are so focused on autonomy that they lose sight of the bigger picture and strategic goals. | Define clear objectives and key results (OKRs) to align team efforts with broader organisational goals. |
| Lack of Product Wide Innovation | Efforts to reduce synchronous collaboration might isolate teams and reduce opportunities for creative problem-solving. | The product vision and strategy should be used to define objectives for Stream Teams that deliver on cross-functional initiatives. |
Anti-patterns
- Micromanagement in Disguise: Providing autonomy but continuing to control team decisions through frequent check-ins and approvals.
- Innovation Stifling: Encouraging risk-taking without supporting a safe environment where failure is accepted as part of the learning process.
- Communication Fatigue: Repeating messages so frequently that it becomes noise, reducing the impact and clarity of the intended communications.
- Siloed Autonomy: Teams operate so independently that they become disconnected from the needs and developments of other teams, reducing organisational cohesion.