Building high-performing product teams: The PDLC approach

Building product teams is a responsibility. Nurturing them is a privilege.  Get both of these right and your organization's innovation reaches new heights. The key is building teams on trust, collaboration and continuous improvement.

Throughout my two decades of product experience, I've led phenomenal teams and teams with endless room for improvement.  Weak product teams struggle with misalignment and mistrust, creating toxic environments. Strong teams thrive on collective purpose and camaraderie.

Gallup reports that "59% of employees are just filling a seat and watching the clock" - a sign of weak teams.  As a manager, you know the negative impact on morale, productivity and profitability this has.

So, how do you build and retain high-performing product teams that are crushing objectives year after year? A product team has two critical components:

Without a strong think tank, the delivery engine solutions miss the mark. Let's delve deep into how to build a strong, innovative team of product managers that enforces a product culture of human excellence and trust.

You hire product managers because you have products to build or advance. You want these products to succeed, and as a leader you define what success looks like for your product portfolio. My most successful teams have been the ones where I've taken these success criteria (i.e. metrics) and built out a product team tree. Start with your organization's North Star, split that into north star influencers, map them into product levers, and tie them to product pods led by product managers to drive success. 

Before moving any further, define your ideal product culture based on your organization's needs and values. Below are attributes of some of the best product cultures I've had the privilege of leading.

Once you know the product culture and product managers required, ensure your team has a mix of skills and expertise. Diversity in perspectives and expertise leads to innovative and resilient product teams.

Prioritize gauging the cultural fit of your product managers as you make hiring or coaching decisions for the team.  My current company, Acuity Insights, does this remarkably well. Our hiring process is on par with Google's hiring process (from a cultural fit perspective). I say this not because I lead their product team, but because I landed on that conclusion way before I was hired by them!  By being deliberate about the type of product managers we've let into our teams, we've reinforced and guarded our organizational values - equitable, caring and curious in our case.

Additionally, focus on prioritizing soft skills over hard skills for your product managers.  Shipping successful products is about corralling a group of humans together to move in the same direction. Product managers are constantly negotiating varying needs with strong personalities to sell their product vision to stakeholders. When you are building your product team, make sure they exemplify Forbes' top 10 in-demand soft skills for 2024: click here.

Building your team doesn't end with hiring or coaching product managers.  Create the ideal culture you defined in the previous step with the help of your team.  Leading multiple product teams across a B2C Fortune 50 company and several B2B companies that I helped grow up to 5x in valuation, has taught me to build product cultures by:

Now that you have your product team infused in your product culture, it's time to sell their stories and enable your organization to do the same.  It's always been important to me that my product teams' outcomes are visible to the organization. Here are a few ways I've marketed my teams' achievements:

Constantly remind your team that it's not bragging if it's based on facts. Give them ample opportunities to shine in the limelight and share their achievements.

Regularly measure your team's performance, not to penalize them, but rather to iterate on processes, products and strategies. I've done this as a senior product leader at PointClickCare by creating systems that constantly monitor product success metrics in Pendo, customer satisfaction trends in Pendo, and team burnout rates in Jira. I used the burnout metric as my counter metric -- I don't want my teams succeeding at the expense of their health or work-life balance, ever!

As effective leaders, our job isn't just to monitor reactively, but also to intervene proactively to help product teams navigate challenges.  Anticipate product challenges your team may face, and have strategies in place to address them before the going gets tough. For instance, I'm in the process of redefining the PDLC at Acuity Insights, and I can already foresee some of our release practices cripple in the next year. Rather than wait, I've started encouraging my team to explore a more gated release process with the Engineering leaders for their products. I've also had numerous instances where I've inherited product teams that have zero tech-debt representation on their product roadmaps.  

Every time I take on a new product team, I work hard within my first 90 days to get a tech-debt roadmap going for our product portfolio. No point painting over a wall that actually has a leak - #true-personal-story! Then there was the time when our Board decided to entirely change our TAM direction for a major overhaul of a legacy product, a quarter into my teams already starting work - oof!  As a product leader, however, since I ensured our market discovery and product strategy was broad enough from day one to understand the needs of adjacent verticals, my teams faced that headwind with impeccable resilience. This one was about having, at a minimum, a shared mental model of both short-term and long-term product direction from the get-go. It helped us anticipate upcoming headwinds and scale our unknowns to knowns quickly.

When I took Product Faculty's course for Product leaders, I fell in love with their product growth equation:

Ever since, I've applied this same equation to my team of product managers. Years ago, I surveyed product managers who had remained individual contributors at their organizations for years. The survey results uncovered that one of their biggest frustrations was their companies not promoting from within when looking for more senior product talent. This was in line with how I had felt, at the time, being a Principal Product Manager at my organization.  It was also in line with how a lot of my product friends had felt through their corporate careers. I promised myself that year that when I grew into a managerial position, I would strive hard to promote from within first. And that's what I've done ever since.

I share this because if you want to retain top product talent, you have to invest in their growth - both at the product craft and the career ladder.  Here's what's worked for me in retaining top talent:

Building and nurturing product teams requires leaders to "sit in the mud with them" (Simon Sinek). It requires being laser-focused on the vision for your product team and culture, diversifying the PM talent on your team, fostering a psychologically safe environment, providing empathetic and decisive leadership, and committing to continuous improvement. 

As markets and technologies evolve, the ability to adapt and iterate on team structures and processes also becomes crucial for sustained success. Failure to do so will result in your strongest product people leaving, taking with them the mindsets and frameworks that have driven their success thus far. This will result in the continued proliferation of the product mindset and growth globally but also hamper your organization along the way. 

So, how will YOU build and nurture your product teams? Let me know of your thoughts in the comments below.