Building Your Product Team

High performing Product Teams are formed through high trust relationships, shared vision and next level camaraderie.

We're assembling a menu of activities to rapidly move your team through early stages of team formation (storming, forming, norming) and into the performing zone.

Trust Building

Trust is at the core of teamwork. A team in a high trust environment goes faster, has stronger ideas, continuously gets better and consistently achieves (perhaps even exceeds) goals.

Team Communication

A collection of games that focus on team communication and how we interact with each other in noises (like speaking words), gestures and writing. Bring on the fun and frustration!!!!

Team Creativity & Innovation

Use team creativity to solve problems better, generate new products and services and create value out of nothing! The experimental nature of creativity is also great practice to reduce that the fear of failure!!

What is a Product Team?

In it's simplest form, a Product Team is a group of people coming together to solve a customer problem.

We're biased towards digital product here - where product teams consist of skills across:

Depending in your org you may have dedicated specilist for these functions - or you might have team members where multiple hats. What's important to recognise is that all of these work together to give you the best chance of creating something people love to use.

The folks over at Miro have a rather neat acronym for the AMPED - which stands for Analytics (i.e. Data), Marketing, Product, Engineering and Design. 

Building Trust

Why does "Trust" matter? Well, just like any team with a shared mission - no one person can do it all. A team will rely on the individual players to do their jobs and make decisions for the benefit of the team. This is where trust matters - you are working together and relying on others for a common purpose. Without trust you have much less chance of success.

What does high Trust look like?

How can you build trust?

There are a couple of foundations - being competent at your role  being a major one. This is often hard for Product Managers because there really isn't a shared viewed of what is/is not product management. It is usually much clearer for other roles in the team - Engineers write the code, Designers create the UX. So for Product Managers it is important to create clarity of roles and responsibilites with your team. Setting this foundation will go a long way to earning the trust of your team.

A simple starting point is to survey your team and ask them what they think the PM role is and the responsibilities it should cover. You will learn quickly how much the team expects of you and how diverse those expectations are. It's not uncommon for the PM to be viewed as the "catch all" for anything that doesn't neatly fit into one of the existing team roles. 

In addition to the competency for the role, we're humans at the end of the day and we all have our quirks and a history that has lead us to where we are. Empathy is created by learning more about someone, learn more about each other with these team exercises:

Team activities for building Communication

"Communication" is a funny thing that means a lot of different things, in a lot of difference contexts.

Within a team context we can think of it as shared language and customs. 

Often, misunderstands occur because context is not shared and language is not labelled. There is tension between "simple and concise" and "clear and comprehensive" - it is not uncommon for two people to walk away from a conversion with completely different interpretations. This is a whole of team challenge - but particularly important for PMs who often play a connector role with other parts of the org.

The key thing to recognise as a PM is that this is "the work". There is no silver bullet, no one way to rule all others. You will need to learn which styles and methods work best for your team and counterparts across your org. You will need to continuously refine your key messages and repeat them more often then you like. Cutting and slicing content across different mediums will be key to success - you want the same message with different shapes:

*this is not exhaustive but rather illustrates the point - there is no silver bullet.

Some fun team based games to work in providing clear and concise instructions

Team activities for building Creativity

Creative problem solving is essential if you want to move fast as a team. Generating ideas is pretty easy - but great ideas is a skill to develop. If you only ever seem to generate incremental ideas, building and flexing your team's creativity will unlock step change. You'll find new ways to leverage your data, insights and experience to generate the next big ideas.

Jake Knapp's SPRINT framework is great reading full of lots of ideas to take flex your creative product muscles. Other team tools to build the creativity muscles:

How to get the most out these activities

These activities are designed to be lightweight and only require a little preparation. 

BUT......just because they're lightweight doesn't get you off the hook that easy - as the facilitator you need to have a goal, select the activity and prepare the team - do this and you'll have a bag of fun and grow together.

Each activity will serve a different purpose, take a different amount of time and require different ingredients.