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Practical problem
and I think in my observations,
companies that are scaling really fast,
at times, you can adopt the philosophy
of throwing people at the problem.
So you hire a lot of people
and sometimes down the road,
you realize you probably
don’t need so many.
And at least in theory, where you started
off, what the hypothesis was,
more people includes is equal to more
work, and we get things moving faster.
But, at times, it actually ends up
slowing you down massively
because you create so many
interdependencies among start.
To sustain these teams, I would say
that there are two broad things,
it’s is a difficult problem.
There is no silver bullet to this,
but two broad things which people should
be careful of and specifically leaders is,
one, having clear ownership areas,
and I mean this more for product teams.
And then if product teams are organized
around self-contained smaller units
that are attacking a particular problem.
Having that in place is very key.
I will give you an example, one of
my mentors and mangers earlier,
we were on this growth spree and idea was,
hey, I want five more product managers.
That was my pitch to him.
He actually made me write down,
what do you think these product managers
are going to do for the next one year?
What is their area? What is the matric
they are going to target,
and give me examples of projects
that you think they will really do?
And when I put my mind to it, I realized
that six months down the line,
I would probably not have work
for more than half of them,
because I have not thought
this through enough.
In the short-term, I am just looking at
getting these few tasks and projects done,
but in the long-run,
will this be sustainable?
So, having clear ownership areas
with clear KPIs on how to measure
if you really succeeded in solving
that ownership area.
If that is there for a product manager
and then this cohesive unit,
I think it really works well in
keeping the motivation up
and sustaining a high performing team.
The second is a very broad
term, I think culture.
See, in most of hyper-growth environments
and teams at scale large,
it is difficult to maintain a particular
kind of culture within an organization.
Almost siloed culture start to evolve
within different groups, functions, teams.
It is very important to keep a
good pulse on what is going on.
And a lot of times, this gets blindsided
because of all the other things
and their day jobs that come in.
And by culture I mean, how the culture
within this product organization,
and by product organization I mean,
product, technology, design, research,
maybe even analytics,
and the self-contained team
that is responsible for delivering
solutions at different levels.
What’s the product culture there like?
Are all these functions almost
operating in silos themselves,
or they look at themselves
as a contained unit?
Is there enough
discussions, collaborations,
are people meeting often to ideate,
are people sharing enough feedback?
Or, is everything going in
a very sequential manner?
That is something that you
want to keep together
because that’s how most high-performing
teams and products are build.
The second is, how this entire product
team is looked at from the outside,
which means from the other functions.
Is this looked at as a value adding team
or is it more like a cost center?
How well is that established?
And this has a lot to do with not just
engagements right at the bottom most level
of product manager interacting
with an operations manager,
but also how senior leader
evangelize within their forums?
How they evangelize around what
product is supposed to do?
How they get pushback on
incoming requests a lot?
How they almost had the seat at the table
of decision making at the highest level?
So, these two things,
if they are core ingredients
that are though in terms of culture
and in terms of clear ownership areas,
I think they work well in sustaining
high performance product.
17 сен 2024
