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")