“Nothing gets done by the individual anymore.”
Richard Banfield
Developing world-changing digital products is an exciting and complex process. Getting your innovative ideas realised and onto the market is never a solo effort. As the quotation above implies, it’s a team effort all the way. And what kind of team do you want working on your product? What kind of team do you want to be part of? High-performing? Cross-functional? Empowered? Bold? Enthused? Yes, to all of that, absolutely!
But how do you set up, nurture and lead a product team like that? How do you keep everyone moving in the same direction, build and maintain trust, invest in relationships, and empower everyone to make the decisions that will bring success? To find out, Product Unleashed spoke with Richard Banfield, transformative product leader, author, artist, and – at the time of our talk – VP of Design Transformation at software company InVision.
What is a high-performing team?
First, let’s just define our terms…
A high-performing team is laser-focused on the product goals, has a clearly-defined common purpose, includes a wide range of skills and knowledge, and outperforms other teams, usually exceeding expectations. Such a team is, not to put too fine a point on it, highly successful.
“What is common in high-performance teams is that they are cross-functional, collocated, and autonomous.”
Richard Banfield, from “Product Leadership”
The other core characteristic of a high-functioning team is alignment – everything is in sync. What needs to be aligned? Everything, including the mission of the company, the vision for the product, structure and principles of the team, values, methodologies, metrics, processes, tools & technologies… a whole series of agreements within the team, and they all need to be focused on the same goal: an amazing (and successful) product.
Richard has four key strategies that focus on setting up that degree of alignment and ensuring high performance. But before we dive in and examine each one, we need to acknowledge a critical ingredient: trust.
The importance of trust
Teams are high-performing because they trust each other. There’s an essential underlying foundation of trust. The agreements mentioned above, the clarity and alignment, tell the team where it’s heading – trust is the fuel that gets them there. The trust doesn’t have to be there from the start – that’s probably a bit optimistic! – but ultimately, building anything is an exercise in trust and Richard’s four strategies for high-performing teams all generate trust between team members.
Strategy #1 – Flow Efficiency
A high-performing team doesn’t just ‘make things’, it isn’t a factory with its members simply cogs in the machine. Achieving flow efficiency is about continuous delivery – less about everyday ‘resource efficiency’ and more about movement with reduced friction and increased velocity towards the goal.
Flow efficiency requires more interactions between team members. Design, development, production, etc. all happens through partnership, discussion, communication, and the clarity that follows. A team working with flow efficiency:
- Respects time constraints
- Is inclusive – both in terms of diversity and domain/expertise
- Is cross-functional from the start
- Uses dynamic processes and adapts them to changing circumstances (i.e. isn’t locked into a dogma)
- Focuses on solving problems
- Delivers outcomes rather than outputs (i.e. did they produce value and not, did they produce an app or widget)
Teams that operate like this build confidence, and that confidence builds trust.
Design sprints, with their clear structure and focus, are a great way to practice and try this out – flow efficient working in just one week!
Strategy #2 – Starting Together
A high-performing product team is cross-functional, with multiple areas of expertise and knowledge shared between its members. It’s important that the team ‘starts’ together – i.e. everyone, all the experts, come together in the early meetings, whether they think their expertise is required at this stage or not. This is about working as a group from the very beginning of the process. Early meetings might be more design-focused, but you need the engineers and the QA experts there too. Everyone gets a voice, everyone has the opportunity to contribute and be heard. This is critical to creating a shared understanding and commitment to the goals, the product vision, the team’s agree principles and shared values, and so on. This might sound unnecessarily expensive but it helps create velocity – better understanding and clarity lead to faster, more focused progress.
Strategy #3 – Invest in Relationships
Another feature of high-performing product teams is the time they invest in building relationships. Time spent engaging with each other, discussing the project and the data, surfacing any bias or assumptions, etc. will pay off in better team performance. It is through this ongoing ‘getting-to-know-you-better’ activity that the team builds alignment, develops a common language, and begins to work as more of a frictionless unit, instead of a collection of individuals.
This is not about strict consensus-building – a diverse team will have diverse opinions. But it is about alignment on what everyone is working towards. The destination is agreed even if there are different views on the best route to take.
This strategy of relationship-building pays off with clients and end users too – when the team understands their needs, there’s an obvious payoff in the design and development of the product.
Strategy #4 – Decision Making
All of this so far leads to better decision-making. Trust, alignment of purpose, understanding, and knowing each other… all lead to better decisions. What’s more, in a high-performing team, every member feels empowered to take their own decisions within their zone of expertise, and contribute to decisions on wider issues. How can you help the team get to this stage? There are plenty of decision-making frameworks around. Richard Banfield’s preference is for the Decision Stack, developed by Martin Eriksson.
The Decision Stack is basically a hierarchy of factors that good decisions are aligned with; for example:
- Vision
- Strategy
- Company OKRs / Goals
- Team OKRs
- Team Scope
- Team Principles
If a decision can be aligned to these previously-agreed items (which cover the wider organisation and the individual agreements made within the team), then there’s a degree of assurance that it’s a good decision (at least, good enough to move forward on).
Using this (or a similar) structure for decision-making means that the whole team becomes ‘decision-capable’; there’s no reliance on the team leader being present to move things forward.
High-Performing Product Teams – key takeaways
There’s no doubt you want a high-performing team working on your product – by definition, they simply outperform other teams (the clue is in the name!) The big question is how to build and maintain such teams, and the answers lie in Richard’s strategies. Alignment is key – but you’re not looking for uniform thought processes, just agreement on the destination and the basic principles of getting there. Involving everyone early, investing the time needed to build useful and meaningful relationships, and ensuring everyone sees themselves (and can act) as decision-makers are key steps to achieving the flow efficiency that results in the best products. And underpinning all of this, is trust in a continuous feedback loop. All of this builds trust. And trust enables all of this.
To give the final word to Richard,
“This transformation isn’t always easy, but it is a muscle you can exercise and strengthen. It’s worth it!”
Richard Banfield