3 qualities behind successful product teams

Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io

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Jan 30, 2023

Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰

Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your bi-weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕

Comic of the week 💬

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/10dwsr6/proper_alignment/

We often think that Product Managers work alone, like a lone captain paving the way for the rest of their soldiers. Not going to lie, PMs do work alone on many occasions, from figuring out the roadmap to dealing with customers. But a product team’s success can only happen with all hands on deck, meaning teamwork from the PM to the engineers to the marketers and so on.

Let’s look at some tips and tricks companies follow to ensure they’re nurturing a successful product team.

1. Dropbox’s 3-phase review process 🚧

Sean Lynch joined Dropbox’s product team while the team was still small. Since the company was still growing, most of the product decisions were handled by the company’s CTO and co-founder. This worked for some time, but as the company grew bigger, the CTO got busier and waiting on him to review every product decision was slowing them down. It wasn’t clear when the CTO should be involved, what he actually needed to review, and what kind of feedback would be helpful.

This was when another PM at Dropbox, Anand Subramani suggested a simple framework that would break down a project into different review stages.

Phase 0 — What is the problem we’re solving? Why is it worth solving?

Phase 1 — How are we going to solve that problem?

Phase 2 — What does our solution look like?

The framework solved and improved the review process in 3 ways:
a. It helped everyone understand which phase a project is on and what kind of feedback should be given at that particular stage. For example, Product teams started understanding that giving phase 2 feedback in a phase 0 stage wasn’t helpful.

b. It helped to reach an agreement on the problem from different stakeholders and then focused on getting an agreement on the solution. This gave the team a boost of confidence knowing that they were going in the right direction.

c. Finally, the 3 phase review tightened communication because it helped teams understand which stage different projects were on. Engineering knew how urgent a team’s staffing requirement was, Support knew when a project would start impacting customers, and marketing would know if it was too early to start working on campaigns because the project would have too many changes.

Source: https://medium.com/@slynch/the-most-important-thing-dropbox-did-to-scale-product-management-fed90e30697e

2. Intercom’s light transparent roadmap 📈

Intercom is known for its structured roadmap where all releases are split into 3 main timeframes: releases over the next 6 weeks with clear dates, releases over the few months, and releases over the later months with loose ideas that align with their mission.

Their roadmap is fuelled by 3 sources:

a. Things that the product leadership believes in. This stems from ideas and trends they have witnessed.

b. Qualitative feedback from customers via weekly conversations they have with the product and sales teams. Based on this feedback, the roadmap is reviewed monthly by sales and product leadership to ensure they’re removing these barriers.

c. Quantitative feedback which is defined by success metrics in each project.

Everything on Intercom’s roadmap is broken down by team objective, which is broken down into multiple projects, and in turn, broken down into individual releases. This ensures that each person’s effort is driven by a common goal.

Source: https://www.intercom.com/blog/how-we-build-software/

3. Staying close to the customer 🗣️

Sudheendra, who held leadership roles at Segment and was also the co-founder and head of product at Belong says that every member of the product team should interact with customers. This means that everyone from leadership to associates should do support. This helps the team understand the core problems of the product and the corresponding use cases directly from the source itself than hearing it from someone who hasn’t faced the issue.

Picture this: a product team where only a few folks have listened to the issue from the customer V/S a product team where everyone has listened to the issue from the customer.

Which team do you think will build a better solution? The answer is clear.

That’s why it’s important for teams to set apart some time weekly and block their calendars to listen in to customer calls. This helps the team come up with better solutions when they all know how much it is impacting the customer.

Source: https://www.seedtoscale.com/content/5-habits-of-successful-product-teams

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That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.

See you again in two weeks! 🥂

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