Product Management Culture: How to Build a Product-Driven Team

According to Ron, “Most organizations desire to be impact-driven, but few understand what this entails.” For instance, you may be steering your team to work toward a specific goal, key performance indicator (KPI), or metric—but have you ever stopped to consider what each team member contributes toward the organization’s goal of being impact-driven? How often did each team member make decisions that directly contributed to that impact?

If each team member feels responsible for the company’s products, they will be better positioned to help the company become impact-driven.

It’s definitely easier to make the Product Manager responsible for the product, have them share specifications with the engineering team, and review the product after development. However, this may create a communication gap between your organization and the users, which puts the engineering team farther from what they created. Without the Product Manager, they may not be able to deliver value to your users.

Building a team of Product Owners will ensure that your team is not only impact-driven but also deeply concerned about what the users think about their product. This way, they can build and scale the product to have the most impact on its users.

Implementing the product management culture in your organization will reduce the communication gap between product management, engineering, product design, and other teams involved in the process.

In addition, it creates a common language between those teams that involves focusing on the user’s needs, making it easier for them to collaborate to build impactful products. There will also be less tension, and your team will work cordially and in a fun environment.

The product management culture will help you maximize resources if you have a small team. As Ron puts it, “Everyone can take up the Product Manager role and be classified as builders building the product.”

Hence, you don’t need to hire for all roles if you can’t afford to, as everyone will contribute equally to ensure that the product meets the company’s goals and KPIs. Also, the product management culture will inform how, when, and what to build with the available resources.

Ron recommends introducing the product management culture to new members when onboarding them. Instead of giving new team members tasks specific to their skills, you can introduce them to the Product Owner’s mindset by giving them end-to-end ownership over that specific task.

It would be best if you showed new team members that your team adopts the Product Owner culture from their first task and continues to do so with subsequent tasks.

New members may possess great technical skills, but their understanding of the product is more important. If they don’t begin by understanding the product metrics, they won’t be able to know if the product is delivering value or not.

Ron advises ensuring that the engineering team and other teams not typically responsible for handling user interviews also conduct them. It does not have to be a verbal or direct user interview. You can set out specific days to invite users over and get them to use the product while the team observes and takes note of areas requiring improvement.

Full story sessions are recordings of specific user sessions within the product. You can introduce the product management culture to your team by getting them to watch full story sessions, mainly focusing on recently added product features.

This way, they’ll understand how the users view the features and how they can improve the product to create more impact on the users.

Conducting user interviews, reading feedback, and watching full story sessions may seem like a full-time job, but it should not be. Instead, Ron recommends dedicating a few hours a week to all of that, as your team still needs to get on with their technical responsibilities.

You can, however, maximize your time if you focus on improving efficiency in other areas. Here are some ways to improve your team’s efficiency while building impact-driven products:

Build a data-driven team

Ron advises developing data lakes internally to measure the features within the product and ensure that everyone in the team can slice and dice the data to get any required information. This way, you won’t spend too much time trying to understand the impact of specific things on users and how they use the new features.

Measure everything

Keeping track of everything will help your team perform more efficiently. According to Ron, “You need to create dashboards for everything and add widgets to the dashboards that are relevant for that specific feature.” By doing so, your team can work more independently while still being product-centric.

Not everyone will easily fit into the product-centric culture, but some people may already be exhibiting traits of the product management culture. Hence, it would be best if you focused on closing the gap between people who already adopt the Product Owner mindset and those who don’t.

Don’t make immediate decisions like scrapping roles that you believe are not product-centric. Instead, you can keep the roles but focus on creating a common language across the teams. You can also start making small changes toward reaching a specific goal and implement them for subsequent goals.

Your organization might have drawn up charts with detailed descriptions of each team member’s roles and responsibilities as well as the chain of command. However, this may limit the adoption of the Product Manager culture by your teams, making people in non-product teams feel they are not responsible for the product.

Ron recommends getting everyone involved in the product-building process and allowing everyone to take responsibility for what’s happening rather than adopting such narrow job descriptions.

Ron also advises redefining the Product Manager’s role within the context of the product management culture. For example, nothing in the Product Manager’s job description should imply that the Product Manager is the only person responsible for drawing up product specifications, reviewing the users’ feedback, and thinking about opportunities. Instead, define how you’ll like them to act as a member of the builders’ team.

Acknowledging the team members’ impact can help create a product-centric culture. You can recognize team members with good practices that improve a product’s performance by sharing good feedback received because of each team member’s contribution. This way, team members get to see the immediate impact of what they do on users.

However, the kind of behavior you highlight as worthy of praise also matters. For instance, if you focus on engineering skills, you’re going to get more of that from your team. But if you focus on the impact, it will encourage more of that.

Keeping track of product metrics such as satisfaction rate, churn rates, and bounce rate, even for specific features, is a solid way to understand the impact of your product features. If the metrics have been poor for a certain period of time, you can fix that and improve the impact.

Encourage your users to submit feedback on specific features recently introduced to the product. This way, you can tell what isn’t working for your users and improve it quickly.

Most companies connect feedback to CRM systems so the customer success team can read them and open bugs for the ones that need to be fixed. However, Ron recommends connecting everyone within the team to keep them visible to your team and see the immediate impact. In his words, “Your team members will understand that there are users that use the product.”