Leading a Thriving Product Team

Software product development is a team sport so how a team works with each other is as important, if not more, as the skills of the individuals on the team. A big part of product leadership is ensuring that your product team works well with each other. While there is no such thing as “best practices”, there are some things you can do to lead a thriving product team.

Best practices for managing a product development team. The only thing more dynamic than developing a product is managing the team behind it. The collective product development team works together, but team members report to different parts of the org chart and may have additional responsibilities to their functional team outside of their product duties. There is plenty of room for ambiguity, tension, and even dysfunction. the team at Aha describe a proactive approach to managing product development teams that will help your product team be as effective as possible.

(via @aha_io)

Leading empowered & distributed product teams. Co-located product teams are no longer the status quo. With companies operating in hybrid or fully remote settings, teams had to learn and adapt to foster creativity, experimentation, collaboration, and execution. That’s something that came pretty naturally to Christoper Brereton and his team as they’ve worked in this way for years leading up to the pandemic. Christopher shares the practices that helped his team work remotely to help other Product leaders that are still wrestling with this way of working.

(via @RootChris)

How to build your product management team. At the heart of every business is a product. Sometimes, it’s positioned as a service, but even firms selling only consultancy time have a proposition that’s dressed up as a buyable, differentiated package. This makes product management a significant, strategic role in any organization. And for software vendors that put products at the heart of their business, it’s vital. Getting it right can spell success. Getting it wrong can be disastrous. Saeed Patel provides some tips on how you can build your product management team.

(via @bcs)

Systems, not mandates: how to build better product teams. Why aren’t product managers talking to more customers? Why aren’t we running more experiments? Why aren’t product managers thinking holistically about the end-to-end experience we’re building? Whether your organization faces the pressure of an economic downturn or scaling challenges, these concerns show up along the way. In either case, if you want to survive, move fast and focus on the most impactful problems. Alex Hughes delves into the conversation of building better product teams, and why focusing on the system matters the most.

(via @MindtheProduct)

Lead your product teams through a recession. Business leaders, venture capitalists and market analysts agree a recession is looming. Without question, startup capital has become harder to raise. Ben Foster describes how startup CEOs can lead product teams through challenging moments like this so that their business not only survives, but can thrive on the other side. As a product person, it's helpful to know what CEOs should do and how you can help them.

(via @prodify)

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Product Management News: Week of March 6, 2023

If you dread firing up your laptop every morning only to be bombarded by a slew of notifications and aren’t willing to simply turn them off, Spoke might be the tool for you. The tool is an aggregation layer that aggregates, prioritizes, and summarizes information from productivity tools such as Slack, Jira, Microsoft Teams, and Office 365.

Twitter has so few engineers left that there is only one site reliability engineer working on a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API.” The lesson here is don’t let technical debt fester for too long. And if you do, don’t go bare bones on the staff with the skills to fix it.?

LinkedIn has long used AI to enhance its members’ professional experiences. They also realize that using AI comes with risks and potential for harm. As a result, the team at LinkedIn produced and shared their Responsible AI Principles, which include a commitment to uphold trust, provide transparency and promote fairness and inclusion.

One responsible use of AI may be to help you pour through all the product feedback you receive to summarize it and establish actionable insights. Relevance.ai is a no-code platform built to use AI to tag, search and analyze your data faster in minutes. The tool allows you to analyze and summarize text, image, and audio data.