Five Attitudes to Become a High-Performing Team
Increasing productivity is easier than you imagine. A set of simple choices can change your results forever.
Increasing productivity is easier than you imagine. A set of simple choices can change your results forever.
Since the outbreak of Covid-19, uncertainty is the only certainty we have. The way we work has dramatically changed. Working remotely is the new normal. Therefore, we face different challenges to overcome. More than ever, distractions put us far from our goals.
How can you excel in delivering value while the world doesn’t let you focus? If you try to do everything, your impact will be shallow, and this leads to mediocrity. However, you have a way out of this dreadful situation; your choices will make the difference.
“Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
Digital product management demand is skyrocketing. Companies are hunting talented professionals to help them thrive. Yet, it’s daunting to be a solid Product Owner. After traveling this journey for a decade, I have found a set of attitudes that make a difference in our uncertain world.
Let me share with you some insights on how to lead your teams to high-performance. I hope you can apply some of my ideas to your situation.
1. Pursuing Clear Goals Instead of Filling the Gaps
A common misconception of product management is filling the gaps or try to do a little bit of everything. Well, that will lead you nowhere but to disappointments. High-performing teams have clear goals to pursue, and they invest proper time in reaching their goals. Only once a goal is achieved, they allow themselves to pursue another.
It’s never about doing more. It’s all about doing what matters the most. If you want to lead teams in successful directions, you should learn how to craft meaningful goals to pursue and block the team from distractions.
“Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground.” — Theodore Roosevelt
2. Impact vs. Output
During my Product Owner journey, I realized that I was locked in a trap called feature factory. Day in, day out, I led Scrum Teams to produce more features just for the sake of doing it. We focused solely on the output while we ignored the outcome.
What shocks me is that I observe many teams suffering from the same problems I did. It’s easy to identify this anti-pattern, feature factory teams present the following traits:
Cannot focus on goals
Work on multiple features simultaneously
Do not kill useless features
Define success by more features going live
Failure means missing arbitrary deadlines
To deliver meaningful value, first, you have to understand the impact you want to generate. Then, you can work the solution backward. This strategy allows you to approach your product from an outside-in perspective. Without a thorough outcome focus, pointless solutions are inevitable.
“Thinking like an owner versus thinking like an employee is primarily about taking responsibility for the outcome rather than just the activities.”
― Marty Cagan, EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
3. User Experience vs. Cutting Corners
Products and services exist for a single reason: to improve people’s lives. Surprisingly, many teams ignore the end-user by building solutions that please business stakeholders over customers’ needs.
First comes the users. Once you delightfully solve their problems and their lives become easier, the rest will follow. If you try to put business first, it will be common to hear customers saying, “Well, that’s nice. But I see no use in it for me.”
“You cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.” — Dieter Rams
4. Serialize vs. Parallelize
Unfortunately, many managers are obsessed with multi-tasking. They believe the more you can handle in parallel, the more you can deliver. I challenge if that makes sense at all. My perception is that the more you multitask, the lower your delivery quality is.
I’d like to suggest you a simple exercise, take a blank page and write on the first line from 1 to 10; after it, on the second line, write from A to J. Please measure the time you took to do it. Now, try alternating the lines. You write first a number on the first line, then a letter on the second. How long did it take you to do that? Probably the second exercise took you longer than the first.
In a simple exercise, you can feel the high cost of multitasking. The more you add, the slower you become. If this cost is present when switching between a simple list of numbers and letters, imagine the cost to productivity when switching between complex product development work.
To increase your team's productivity, you should give them the chance to focus on a step at a time. First, you get something done, and then you can start another. This approach will increase not only your productivity but also the quality of the delivery.
“When we think we’re multitasking we’re actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing — quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we’re being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we’re simply giving ourselves extra work.”
― Michael Harris
5. Smaller Batches vs. Longer Batches
How fast can you learn from your customers? Your learning speed determines how quickly you can deliver something meaningful for your customers. Scrum suggests that multiple increments can be generated within a Sprint. Teams can speed up their learnings by doing that.
Multiple Increments may be created within a Sprint. The sum of the Increments is presented at the Sprint Review thus supporting empiricism.
— The Scrum Guide, 2020
A common problem source is called Minimum Viable Product. To validate assumptions, Scrum Teams may work on an MVP. The challenge is who defines what is in and what is out. Generally, stakeholders define the scope of the MVP, which is dangerous because they are mainly feature-focused.
I am not against MVP, but most companies are clueless on how to benefit from it. An MVP should provide the minimum features to validate your hypothesis to solve the customers’ problem. We must remember an MVP is a guess rather than a certain solution to meet our goals.
Don’t focus on building a bazooka to kill a mosquito. Focus on creating something that helps you learn more about your customers.
“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.”
― Eric Ries, The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Companies Without High-Performing Teams Will Die
Disruption is the answer for companies that are unable to reinvent themselves. Ultimately, how the teams work is what defines whether the company will thrive or disappear.
The world is in a dare need of leaders who know how to help teams become high-performing units. It’s all about empowerment and focus. Product Owners who possess and apply this knowledge will outshine the rule followers.
“Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.”
― Marty Cagan, EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
This post was inspired after I read a post by John Cutler on Linkedin.
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