Collaboration: How the best product managers foster creative teams
Background
When you first start out as a product manager you quickly find that there is very little you can get done by yourself. It’s a critical and central role, but getting anything done requires you to work with, influence, lead, and align many other people across different functions. Unfortunately it’s very common for junior product managers to mistake leading and keeping people aligned for “I have to be the one coming up with the winning idea” or “my idea is the one we will push through.”
Collaboration is another loaded term that many people use in conversation and in reality everyone has a different meaning in their head. In my conversations with leaders of product teams the words “teamwork” and “cooperation” will come up synonymously with collaboration and the dictionary definitions are pretty close. The common bits all talk about “working with others,” which is of course part of it. To me, the one closest to the mark of what I think is critical is that of collaboration (Webster):
Collaboration is the action of working with someone to produce or create something
Building products is about creating something with other people. It’s not only having to work in a team environment in service of a larger goal. You can work on all kinds of things in a team environment that are challenging, rewarding, and important, but learning how to create something together is extra, and unique. Not everyone gets to do that, and not everyone does it well. Mastering the art of creating together is collaboration.
Foundational Teamwork
The ability to work effectively with others is expected and foundational for product managers. The most obvious example is the work within their squad or team of UX designers and developers. Practically every day you need to be able to keep many different work streams moving through the team. Being an effective team member draws on several other attributes within the framework, including:
Empathy - do you understand the perspective and drivers of the others in the group?
Communications - can you modulate your communication style appropriately for each audience and setting?
Self-Awareness - Are you paying attention to how your behavior and speech affects others?
Ownership - Are you leading by example, showing the rest of the team you are focused on the quality of the collective output of the team, not just your own work
Being data-driven - you know your customer, product, and market and everyone can see that your decision making is sound
Getting all of these behaviors tuned and in different settings and situations takes a lot of time and practice, but I’d argue it’s still not collaboration. These are all necessary prerequisites, but not the actual thing.
Collaboration is about fostering creativity of the group
In a healthy, empowered, product team (PM, UX, eng), the team is handed a business or customer problem to solve, ideally with a metric to gauge impact of their efforts. Even in this ideal setup, however, there can be a lot of variation in how the team approaches coming up with ideas of where to focus as well as possible solutions.
It’s very common for product managers (at all levels) to be very tops-down and prescriptive with their teams. If not coached properly PMs will often think it’s up to them to figure out both the problem and solution then ask the team to build “their roadmap.” It obviously depends very much on the personality of the PM, but in a worst-case scenario the pressure to deliver against a metric by yourself makes them clamp down more, communications become very uni-directional, and morale takes a dump. If the team asks questions or suggest alternatives the stressed PM takes them as a lack of trust or confidence in their ability. It’s a bad situation, and it happens a lot.
As the product manager of this team, your goal should be to maximize the creative output of your team. If everyone on the team feels fully included in all phases of discovery, prioritization and execution you will get more ideas on the table, likely get to more effective solutions quicker, and in the end have a better shot at delivering for the business.
The first step in getting your team creating together is providing context and visibility into the primary constraints - customer and business value. Just by the nature of the job, the product manager on the team will have the best view into the realities of the business and why the team’s goal was chosen, why it matters, etc. Even in teams where UXDs and engineers participate in user research, the product manager is typically doing more and looking at product usage metrics more frequently. Many PMs will shut out their teams and go it alone because they feel like their team doesn’t have the context. It takes more work to prepare materials, send around data and summaries, but it’s worth it. If you want your team to perform, it’s up to you to make sure they have the appropriate context to participate. Of course you can’t force them to read it, but I think you’ll find most will appreciate the content, they simply don’t have time in their normal day to seek all of this out on their own. Using frameworks like opportunity solution trees from Teresa Torress’ book Continuous Discovery Habits, are great for quickly sharing “what we know about our customers.”
The second important element is to let go of “being the idea person.” When I first started as a PM I thought this was the job. It’s on me to come up with what we are doing. Ironically I had a lead engineer and UX designer on my team that were both amazing at their job. They would often pull me aside after stand ups or larger meetings and ask “did you consider this?” or “did you realize there is a reason why we’ve never done that.” They were very nice, and very patient with me, and remarkably we are still friends 10 years later. :-)
Your job as product manager is to prioritize the idea, or work, that is mostly likely to drive the impact you are targeting, whether that’s a usage metric, financial metric or whatever. Your job is not to come up with the list of ideas, the specific elements of the solution, the look of the user experience. You should hold your team to a high quality bar, you should guide their efforts with your market and customer knowledge, but you should try not to be prescriptive.
The last part is really about asking lots of questions. Effective product managers are curious and are always open to switching directions when new data is presented. Invite your team to poke holes in the plan, your assumptions, the data, whatever. The openness and trust required for creativity to actually happen usually don’t appear on their own. Lead by putting yourself out there, and signaling to the team that you don’t assume you have all the answers, you’re open to being proven wrong if that means finding a better path, and that you want to get their perspective out on the table. You can still put forward a proposal, but you have to make sure you invite open criticism of that proposal, especially if you are on a new team.
Summary
It’s not easy to do, and not always the obvious thing to do, but collaboration is about letting go and putting the outcomes the team can deliver above your own personal achievements, recognition, or advancement. You will be ultimately measured by what you and your team are able to accomplish together. If you are steering the team to seek credit for yourself, or clamping down and being directive because you are under pressure to deliver, it’s very unlikely you’ll get the best out of your team. Give your team proper context, step back and ask questions rather than being prescriptive, and try to have fun. To this day the most fun I’ve had at work were my days as IC product manager working with an amazing team.
