The greatest benefit in empowerment for product leads
Modern product management overloads new product leads with transforming their organization, setting pace and direction, onboarding to the subject matter etc. Product leads also need to quickly identify their stakeholders to ensure clear the way for their team. There is never time to properly invest in initiatives that aren’t directly in the team’s discovery/delivery track, certainly not at the beginning. Does that mean you’re not going to improve on how the team operates, tooling, process etc.?
Without going into an extensive discussion, the objective in mind is what you would call as a “healthy product organization”:
- User focus- Continuous discovery can help with that
- Forward leaning, planning, communicating, aligning etc.- setting the right goals and leading their empowered teams in that direction
- Executing well, agile mindset- planning and delivering frequently with users’ feedback
- A team comprised of competitive, curious individuals, who see growth and happiness being on the team
There’s probably more to this, as this isn’t the topic of the article, I didn’t want to spend too much time here.
So the question in hand is, with everything on your plate, what can you set in motion and move into “trust and verify” mode?
Lucky for me, in past life and now, I am surrounded by amazing individuals, who seem to be thirsty to realize the same mindset, pace and methods I believe in. Developers, product managers, agile leads etc. The idea is to task them, empower them to make decisions, follow their progress and ensure progress is made in the right direction. Actually, it’s not much different from innovating with a new product, and it is so beneficial for you as a product lead. Here’s a couple of tips how to go about that:
- Innovate, validate, define and align: You can come up with an idea, process, tool, whatever it might be. Define the value in your head: what problem does it solve? what outcome are you seeking to achive?. Stage 2- validate with key stakeholders; identify a mix of those who are open and forward leaning and those who might object. Does your initiative hold? listen, learn, refine. Next- Once you have some consistency, define your objective, outcome. Sometimes it’s helpful to get a hint of a direction, or ‘how’, so you’re not talking vaporware and you’re easy to be told ‘can’t be done’. Last- Align: Share your vision with the team so they recognize a change that’s happening around them, even if they are not initially involved. Advocate and be passionate about it. After all- if the outcome wasn’t compelling enough, you wouldn’t pursue it, would you?
- The select bold and the brave (AKA Early adopters): Select a few who are passionate with your vision and represent the key stakeholders who would eventually use your idea. They need to be open to design, try, fail, learn and share. It’s an additional task on their plate, be cognizant of that. However, if they see value for themselves, they will be very motivated to own the initiative and carry it forward.
- Step back, track and steer: Set a recurring schedule to review progress. The idea is to view how the initiative is progressing, one step at a time: discover, experiment, measure, learn, refine, and decide next steps.
With this model, it is possible to focus on strategy and maintaining user/stakeholder relations, while planning next year, figuring out ceremonies and tooling, adopting discovery and agility and so much more. You need to seed the idea, get people passionate about it, and track the progress.
This model is extremely beneficial to launch a number of key initiatives that are not necessarily in the direct discovery/delivery path, and you, as a product lead, never have the cycles for. But with passionate companions, you can certainly make good progress and play an advisor role to move things along in the right direction.
