Leadership & Strategy

How To Deal With Unhealthy Team Dynamics

This article discusses the importance of healthy team dynamics and how to achieve it. A workshop was convened to discuss each person's KPIs, and each team member was asked to reflect on the team's role and contribution to the business. Through this process, the team was able to reach a consensus on KPIs, which was an important reference point. The article also highlights the importance of these workshops, as well as the challenges of organizing them regularly.

Growing Pains of Communicating a Product Vision to Your Team

This article provides advice on how to effectively communicate a product vision to a team as a Head of Product. It suggests identifying the communication problem, understanding what drives a product, hiring a technical product manager, explaining features by demonstrating the business value, and understanding the different roles in managing a product.

Solving Budget Problems by being Creative

When faced with budget constraints, such as hiring freezes or restrictions on buying or renting tools, creativity and a can-do attitude can help to find alternatives. Thinking outside the box and keeping the goal in mind can help to avoid being bogged down by budget constraints.

Proposing Solutions, Not Problems

When working with multiple teams across various countries, it can be difficult for upper management to understand the pain points. As a manager, it is important to bridge the gap by providing useful information and solutions to make the best decisions. Create a concise document with the situation, why it is a problem, and the best solutions. Send the proposal to your boss ahead of time and keep it short and to the point.

Improving Collaboration Through Plans Of Attack

To improve collaboration between teams in different locations, a process was implemented where Plan of Attacks (POAs) were published on a public channel. This gave people from different locations the chance to see what their colleagues were working on and provided a checklist for people to go through. Although the process has helped with team visibility and cross-formation, there are still issues with engagement with the tool. To address this, people are now explicitly asked to tag three people on their POAs to ensure at least three people review the documents and provide comment.

Preparing an Existing Internal Product for an External, Commercial Launch in the Future

As a product manager, the challenge was to balance the direction of the product between the specific use internally and making it sufficiently broad so that it could solve similar problems for external customers in the future. To overcome this, the product manager looked at similar products in the industry, spoke with customers, and built a tactical roadmap for each quarterly release while establishing a three year vision for the product. This allowed the development teams and architects to see what they were working on in terms of immediate use, as well as where the product would be ending in the long term. This external product was later put into use with General Electric and other outside companies.