Great products come from great ideas that meet what customers need. Another often overlooked ingredient for product success is the product team.
According to MIT, the survival rate for new products is stunningly low. The main reason for it is failure to meet customer needs. So, there is unfortunately no team that can make a product fit with customer needs if there was no specific market research to discover customer needs and ensure there is actual product-market fit.
How product teams make the difference in product success
What difference does it make to have a strong product team?
A product can be successful because its value proposition is in sync with what customers want. But when it comes to execution, nothing beats a great product team as a driver for success.
Strong product teams have three mechanisms through which they generate success: better decisions, faster learning, and effective execution.
Better decisions
A strong team looks at problems and opportunities from different perspectives and experiences. This allows to avoid the trap of “group thinking”. Group thinking happens when everyone converges on the same perspective, without duly exploring the full decision space. Strong teams prevent group thinking by allowing and even stimulating different points of view. They make sure to consider and evaluate different opinions before coming to a decision, even when the actual responsibility for the decision lies outside the team.
Faster learning
A strong team learns faster from customers and their behaviors. Its members are not afraid of making mistakes. They believe in facts and use theory as guidelines, not as plain truth. Strong teams are not afraid to test assumptions in the field to validate hypotheses. Strong teams support experimentation: they prototype, test, measure, iterate and move on quickly. In the process, team members cover each other and make sure individuals are not left alone in the process.
Effective execution
Once the product direction is clear, a strong team turns the vision into a product with little coordination and strong conviction. Team members know their roles and act in sync. For example:
- a product manager goes out clarifying a fuzzy requirement
- a product developer fixes a high-priority bug
- a quality assurance member ensures latest changes are bullet proof and ready for integration.
Despite of team members having their own job, they do not work in silo. They always participate even when not in the center of the action. Each team member knows where priorities and bottlenecks are and work together to get them done.
These three virtous impacts generated by effective teams provide with concrete benefits. For CFOs, better decisions, faster learning and effective execution mean more revenue with less expenses. Whereas, for marketing officers they mean higher brand recognition and value. Finally, for CEOs, they mean higher likelihood of successful scaling.
Characteristics of strong product teams
There is no proven formula for building a successful product team. However, in my experience, some characteristics consistently make a difference. They belong to six areas that describe how an effective product team thinks, works and behaves.
1. Individual strengths
A strong product team is not a group of all all equally strong individuals. Nevertheless, strong team members have some key characteristics:
- They understand their strengths and limitations, while remaining curious and willing to challenge the status quo.
- They take responsibility when things go wrong rather than looking for someone to blame.
- They learn from mistakes, recover quickly from setbacks, and help others do the same.
- They actively seek opportunities to grow and take responsibility for their own development.
- They listen genuinely to others, showing empathy and seeking to understand different perspectives.
- They put the interests of the team and the product ahead of their own.
- They are willing to raise concerns, challenge decisions, and speak up when they believe it is in the team’s best interest.
Strong individuals are only one part of a strong product team. The team also needs a combination of complementary capabilities that work well together. This means that the more individuals are “T-shaped”, the more they will be able to work well together and complement each other while retaining their functional and industry expertise.
2. Complementary capabilities
A team with a few immature individuals can still perform well in a team with strong complementary capabilities. On the othe rhand, a team of ten excellent engineers does not necessarily make a strong product team if nobody understands customers, user experience, product economics, or the business context.
Hence, a team should have the right combination and balance of different types of relevant expertise.
In product teams, diversity has two different dimensions:
- Diversity of perspectives. People bring different perspectives based on their functional expertise, domain knowledge, seniority, experiences, and ways of approaching problems. A healthy mix of these perspectives helps teams challenge assumptions and consider problems from multiple angles. The more ambiguous the problem or unexplored the solution, the more valuable this diversity becomes.
- Contextual diversity. The capabilities required depend on what the team is trying to achieve. A team that is well suited to developing a hardware product is not necessarily well suited to building a software product. Likewise, the capabilities required during product discovery may differ from those required during product development and scaling. Industry coverage matters too: some products require deep regulatory, technical, commercial, or domain expertise that cannot simply be substituted with general product experience.
For these reasons, team should be composed around the problem to solve, the solution to build or the opportunity to create. The newer, more complex, or less understood the market, the more important it becomes to bring together people who can look at the problem from different angles, and explore a wide set of solutions.
3. Purpose and direction
Effective teams have clear goals. And every team member commits to the same goal. The goal can be delivering a product feature, improving product performance, or bringing a new product to market within a given time.
From there, each member sets their own objectives based on their role. But the team goal comes first. For example, a developer may have a high-priority objective while a tester finds a bug that slows down development. So, the developer moves to fixing the bug, allowing the team to proceed toward its goal.
Effective teams also focus on outcomes rather than outputs. They do not stop at a technical requirement such as “shorten the number of customer interactions in the onboarding process by 50%” They look for the business outcome behind the requirement, such as “increase activation among new customers by 15%.”. This means addressing customer problems and business needs rather than just working around it with fancy features.
As they are aware of what is behind a specification, strong teams are in control of the outcome of their work. They are not controlled by a feature, a technical requirement, or a predefined solution.
4. Clear roles and responsibilities
Roles and responsibilities are essential for any team member. You cannot be an effective part of a team if you do not take responsibility for what the team is trying to achieve.
Yet, many confuse “shared responsibility” with fuzzy roles and unclear individual responsibilities. A successful product team has members with clear roles and responsibilities, all framed within the goals of the team.
When things go wrong, effective teams do not search for the culprit to blame. They focus on understanding what happened to fix it and avoid it to repeat. This leaves space for an important question: “does the team need a manager or someone formally responsible for the team?“
There is nothing wrong with having someone responsible for the team. But that does not mean that person is the only one accountable. When roles and responsibilities are clear, every team member can take responsibility for the team’s outcomes. This is consistent with the concept of leadership in agile. Someone may be responsible for coordinating the team, communicating externally, or organizing meetings and events. But the entire team can take responsibility for the outcomes.
The same applies to seniority. Senior people may provide guidance and make important decisions, but seniority does not remove responsibility from more junior members.
5. Team accountability
While each team member has specific responsibilities, effective product teams are collectively accountable for the outcome.
Team accountability does not mean that everyone decides everything. Each role can have clear decision scope. For example:
- Product decides priorities.
- Design decides interaction design within agreed principles.
- Engineering decides the implementation approach.
- The team jointly decides trade-offs that cross disciplines.
The team still owns the outcome together.
Effective product teams believe in the product vision and take ownership of making it happen. They do not simply execute tasks assigned to them. Concretely, this translates into virtuous behaviors, such as questioning the motivation behind a requirement, explaining the rationale supporting a chosen solution, and proactively raising issues as they appear.
Ownership also means being willing to go beyond one’s immediate responsibilities when the team needs it. For example, a team member may take on an unexpected task or change her own priorities to address an important risk for the team before it becomes a crisis.
6. Openness to improvement
When a team meets its deadlines and customers are happy, great product teams keep looking for ways to improve.
Mistakes also happen. But great teams do not see mistakes as failures, but as opportunities to learn. Instead of blaming others within the team, members seek to understand what went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. Team members are not afraid to speak up about problems and explore why things happened the way they did.
Effective teams also know when to improve their organization and day-to-day processes. They prioritize issues and distinguish those that require immediate action from those that can wait until after delivery. During retrospectives, strong teams reflect on what went well, what did not go as planned, and what they can do differently next time. They treat feedback as a tool for team improvement, not as a personal judgment.
A practical view of product teams
A successful product team is more than a group of talented people. It has a clear purpose and direction, complementary capabilities, clear roles and responsibilities, shared accountability, and an openness to continuous improvement.
This article is based on my personal experience working with and within product teams. It is my own practical identikit on product teams rather than the result of quantitative research on what makes a great product team. Yet, this should provide you with guidance on how to recognize a successful product team.
Post image by Alean Darmel via Pexels.