Curious product #21 - Team building
A great team have diverse skills used together to achieve outstanding results
There is a problem when recruiting that leads to poor teams: hiring people with similar backgrounds. Sometimes this is done unconsciously. Because most people feel comfortable about being among peers. It even sounds logical - you keep hiring talents that are similar to those proven high performers.
That's the reason why many companies end up with a leadership team of MBAs from the same 2-3 schools. Or a team of people that have degreed from the same university almost at the same year. Employees indicating friends for the team reinforces that logic.
But a great team is not built on similar people. Quite the opposite, the best solutions come from gathering different perspectives on a problem. As Marty Cagan and Chris Jones write in the book Empowered:
Good leaders know that they will get the best results when they are able to consider diverse points of view. (…) Nurturing a team that allows for diverse points of view begins with the hiring process where you consider your team as a portfolio of strengths and backgrounds.
Some argue that you need proven high performers to achieve the best results. The reality, however, is more nuanced than that because:
It's rare that any individual contributor has achieved any result alone. For managers that is never the case.
Anyone needs to adapt to a new environment, companies are not the same and there's no guarantee that a person will replicate past results in the new environment.
You may need to pay above your budget and take a lot of time to actually find those proven talents.
People tend to evaluate performance on a single axis (e.g. promotion) although it should be measured in multiple axes
And you should always consider that an underrated person (which I call hidden talents) is probably not performing at their best where they currently are. In fact, there's way more hidden talents than proven performers in the market. Citing the book Empowered again:
Strong companies have different views on how to leverage their talent in order to help their ordinary people reach their true potential and create, together, extraordinary products
Notice the word ordinary. There isn't something spectacular on the people working in strong product companies (like Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix). Sure they have domain experts - here defined as those recognized by peers to be at the top 1% of their domain. But most of the job is done by ordinary people. It's how teams are assembled and how people contribute to achieve their goals that really matters.
Achieving what those companies have achieved is a long journey by itself. There's a lot written about it and those I typically refer to are the SVPG group, Reforge, John Cutler and Tim Casasola. This whole newsletter is actually a way for me to improve as a product leader by sharing my journey to build truly empowered product teams.
A great team is a portfolio of diverse skills
First, you need to think about the problem the team needs to solve. Some problems requires more analytical insights, some problems require more of a marketing understanding and so on. So you will definitely bias the skills of the people in the team towards that.
Once you think about the skills you need for solving that problem, think what may be missing in the team. For instance, in a highly technical product you will probably have strong engineers and a technical product manager. In this setup you will benefit if that product manager has had some business-related experience, like dealing with data analysis or a consumer facing product. You may also bring a product designer to help with systems design and customer interviews.
Sometimes the team feels uneasy about that. An engineer won't be happy (at least not naturally in my experience) to be in a meeting with someone that does not get the technical details of the solution. The designer will be uncomfortable to be at that setting too. But when those pieces learn how to work together then magic happens.
Check this video about IDEO. In the very beginning (around minute 1:10) the narrator summarizes the brilliancy of the firm telling about how they approach problem solving:
The key to unlocking creativity at IDEO may be their unorthodox approach to problem solving. They throw a bunch of people with different backgrounds together in a room and get them to brainstorm.
Then David Kelley tells how that is the hard part:
That's the hard part. It's the cultural thing of having a diverse group of people and having them be good at building at each other's ideas.
To make it happen we need 3 things:
People need to be really motivated to solve the problems in unconventional ways - you need a team of missionaries.
People like to work with each other, are transparent and eager to learn
Coaching
Hiring underrated talents with the right motivation
In Zero to One, Peter Thiel emphasized that “Talented people don't need you; they have plenty of options”. He goes on to say it's the leadership role to find reasons why employees should join the company. That reason shouldn't be the salary or the perks but the mission and the compelling vision of the future they are building working on the product.
I do think salary and perks are important. If people are not paid enough they have things to worry that will make them perform sub-optimal. But if that is solved, people need to be compelled by the challenges of the product and the personal growth they will have while dealing with them. That's the reason why I typically don't enter a salary auction with any candidate if I know the salary I am offering is good.
I do test for technical competence, that's a super important part. But remember that no one will hit the ground running.
So, mostly I like to evaluate in the process:
How the person is energized by the challenges we face in our products. I like discussing real problems we face in the product during an interview. Usually I learn a ton from that conversation and the candidate has a feeling of the problems he will face may they join the company.
If the person will be a good teammate. Not in the sense of accepting everything from others. We need people that are comfortable challenging assumptions. That's hard to get from an interview, not everyone will get to this point in one or two conversations. So what I often do is the reverse: I ask someone to tell something they have done and start challenging their assumptions politely - usually people that do not stress when they have their assumptions challenged and explain their reasons kindly and clearly are great teammates.
Whether the person is self-motivated and an infinite learner. Daniel Gross has a good point on this:
You have to be really interested in when someone raw and who's like 23 years old comes in and they don't really have all the answers not really put together, but they seem energetic. You have to realize that that person is worth 10 times the person that was at Google for 10 years and thinks they have all the answers.
If you find the right people and cultivate the right behavior - through actions, not words - you will solve problems 1 and 2 that I cited above. But that is not enough without coaching.
Coaching is essential
When a team is assembled or a new member enters the team, ramping them up takes time and a lot of effort both from team members and the leadership. Coaching is, for me, the most important job of a leader.
There are 3 pillars where coaching is really important here:
Technical skills: not everyone in the team will be on par to the skills needed. It's the job of the manager to help people learn what they need in order to execute their role in the team. Often, the team itself is willing to help. Multiple times I asked the tech lead of a product manager I led to help him understand some engineering parts of the product. Tech leads often like to do so.
Domain knowledge: Everyone in the team needs to be well versed on the objective of the team and how that relates to the broader business strategy, the problems they are currently solving and why, the metrics of the product and what are the customer pains. That involves getting in contact with customers and research material. Usually that involves including the whole team (at different degrees) in the product discovery process.
Team communication: That's the most important part of coaching and the most difficult. Solving conflicts and motivating people with different backgrounds to work together is an on-going process. It involves managing the energy of the team in time. The team needs to find the right way to communicate in a transparent and psychological-safe way. That requires developing the emotional intelligence of the team. This is super-hard since we are usually not trained for that in school.
Notice the central role of leadership on team building. From all the things I've learned after transitioning to a manager role, this is probably the most important: my role changed from building products to building teams. And when I see a high-performing team it really pumps me up.
Always be curious,
Thanks for reading.