How to create a demotivated and dispassionate product team
Shriansh Shrivastava
When making a digital product in a large, matrixed organization, there’re going to be issues and pitfalls. Some may lead to delayed delivery and launches, some to overspent budget, or some to cancelled products. One of the worse, though, is when you end up with a team that’s not passionate about the product. If you’re interested in ending up in a situation where you have a team that performs well enough but your products lack creativity and pizazz, read on.
Here’re a few ways to create a demotivated product team.
Let senior leaders and people-who-shout-the-loudest drive your product strategy: In larger organisations, strategy is set at the higher echelons. Vice Presidents decide ‘we need product x to do y next’ which then cascades down to the product manager and the team in the form of ‘Here’s your backlog. Get to it!’ In doing so, you’ve created a situation with two key issues: skipped the ‘Research’ part of the product process (Do people even need or want this feature? You wouldn’t know, because you skipped research!) and more importantly, taken power away from the team, stifling their creativity and making them feel like delivery drones instead. Well done!
Don’t involve Product Designers and Product researchers regularly: Ideally, a good product team will have, in the core team itself, engineers, designers, researchers and product managers. In larger organisations, though, you have Engineering departments, dedicated research teams, design teams and a dedicated product management org. What tends to happen is that research and design teams are involved too early or too late in the product development process. When it’s too early, it’s in the form of ‘We’re thinking about idea x – could you go research and create a few mockups?’ after which the actual action upon those learnings might not happen for months. When it’s too late, it’s in the form of ‘We’re halfway through making this feature. Could you mock up the UI of this in invision or something?’ What you’ve done by doing either of the two is made the design and research teams feel like they’re not part of the product team. In the second instance, you’ve made them feel like graphic designers, instead of the Product experience experts that they are.
Treat engineers as ‘deliverers’: If you only involve engineers during the delivery phases, you create a circumstance where engineers aren’t involved with ideating and working on product strategy at all. All you give them are user stories that they’re supposed to execute on and call it a day. They’ve then got no reason to care about the product, care about how people will experience it, or even care about how it’ll succeed – there’s no skin in the game. Something to remember that the engineers making the product are the closest to it. They know what can be tweaked and what can’t, where shortcuts should be taken and what things are key to the product experience. By not involving them in strategy and ideating conversations, you’re stopping them from reaching the level of passion that’ll do the product good!
Micro-managing team cost: Money spent on a project/product is obviously an important and critical thing to track. But doing this to an extreme (asking for frequent updates, stressing velocity too much, etc.) will naturally bring about a feeling of mistrust and lack of motivation! Treat your team as the qualified individuals that they are. Address performance gaps, not delivery costs!
Being a good product leader is more than just having the world’s most amazing product vision. It’s creating a passionate product team that feels valued and motivated, who in turn creates the world’s most amazing product. How to do so, you ask? For starters, if you see one of the four instances listed above happening in your organization, work to fix it! More to come…