SUNDAY REWIND: Your team is smarter than you are: why autonomous product teams work better

Today’s Sunday Rewind takes us back a few years to a post written by MTP Co-founder Martin Eriksson that delves into the causes of friction between teams in a business. Friction between teams kills momentum and speed. It’s bad for business and is the reason why we have libraries full of project management books and methodologies and the like.

But, as Martin says, if you remove dependencies between teams and introduce autonomous product teams, then there’s no cause for friction.

Read more articles in our Sunday Rewind series.

Each cross-functional team should have all the skills and know-how to execute their objectives. It’s therefore helpful to think in detail about what skills you really need in your team to make it successful, says Martin. It’s also important to consider how to map out that diversity so you ensure you bring in different contexts, experiences, and insights to your team too.

It means casting aside outdated methods of management and empowering these teams. After all, we’re all motivated by autonomy. As Martin says: “At the end of the day, your team is smarter than you are, it has more information than you do, it is closer to the problem than you are, and closer to the customer than you are. So why are you telling your team what to do?”

Autonomy means that the business stays nimble and everyone is involved and accountable. Martin adds that leadership still has a huge role to play in setting the vision, the mission, and the goals that teams are tasked with executing so that those autonomous teams have guardrails within which to operate.

Read Your team is smarter than you are: why autonomous product teams work better in full to get a complete understanding of the benefits of this approach.