What makes product teams great? by Ron Lichty

What makes product teams great?

What if you were able to name just five things that:
    ▪    if you don't do them, you have just a 2% chance of high level team performance
    ▪    if you do all of them, you have a 67% likelihood of high level team performance

Last year's Study of Product Team Performance found just that. Five factors to a 65%-more-likely high performance team:
    ▪    unwavering executive team support
    ▪    strong team alignment w strategy
    ▪    post-production development focus and accountability
    ▪    effective on-boarding of new team members
    ▪    assigning core team members based on skills needed

One of the reasons the study is so useful is that several of those require getting your senior execs on board and the rest require getting your peers on board. And one of the hard truths - about senior managers, at least - is that they tend to believe studies and consultants more than their own people. (And that's one reason why my co-author and I collected 300 Rules of Thumb for managing software people and teams that we share as a quickly thumb-able center section of our book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (Addison Wesley, Oct. 2012). And why studies like this one are so important.)

As for those five factors, you can download last year's study (including some of the comments behind the data).

(For my blog post on another finding of last year's study, see my previous post, "Better cross-functional collaboration, trust and communication")

Better cross-functional collaboration, trust and communication by Ron Lichty

Coming soon: 2013 results:
what makes product teams great?

In 2012's Study of Product Team Performance, respondents were asked what they would change about the core product team.

"Better cross-functional collaboration, trust and communication" was their number-one response.

I was struck by how closely that aspiration aligns with a step that management took 15 years ago when I was at Schwab, a step I was convinced was responsible for my team becoming one of the highest performing I've had opportunity to manage.

The time was February 1997. The team was embarking on building Schwab's first web-based customer applications in Java. At the beginning of 1997, Java was mostly being used for eye candy: animated thermometers, dancing fonts, blinking messages, that sort of thing. Java applets didn't even print. Not that there were a lot of alternatives: HTML was flat and lifeless; Javascript wasn't yet built into a single browser; the only alternative was COM, also very early as a platform. To build business applications in Java at the beginning of 1997 was not just leading edge, it was bleeding edge.

To support the effort, senior management hired a team-building h.r. group - they go by names like "organizational development" - "OD" - but they're all about building collaboration, trust and communication - soft skills - emotional intelligence - that sort of thing.

As keyed up as management was to prove to the execs that we could do something new, something breathtaking, something never done before - they arranged for the entire product team to take entire afternoons offsite multiple times during our short four-month development cycle. Developers, testers, project managers, product managers, business analysts, architects, instructional designers, the whole bunch of us.

That project progressed from research and ideas to working product - an asset allocation toolkit - with functionality that had never before been built even in the client-server world - in a few short months. The team won awards; the product was lauded; Schwab was lionized.

At the time, I remember thinking that I never wanted to work on a product team again that did not undertake significant cross-functional trust and collaboration team-building. I recounted the experience in our book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams. Sadly, I've never worked on one since that did.

The 2012 study reminded me of what gave that Schwab team greatness. The study examined the interactions of Product Managers, Project Managers, Program Managers, Business Analysts, Developers and others actively involved in product development projects.  "The goal of our research was to better understand the dynamics of product team performance and to uncover the practices that make these teams successful. What makes this survey unique is that it enjoys the support of various industry associations and market players — groups and individuals that don't generally work together."