Pseudo-Teams
Pseudo teams could deeply dent your productivity & without even you realizing why. As a leader here’s how you identify whether your teams carry these traits…
“It’s not the number of hours of work / effort that matters but the yield / impact of that which ought to matter”
It always boils down to PRODUCTIVITY when it comes to delivering an outcome for a product team and that’s only fair given how the thinking ought to stem from the understanding one has over the impact to the users measurable in value terms when it comes to product work.
Ravi Mehta built this Product Organization Matrix a while back to help understand the focus a PM ought to have & it is broadly categorized over:
area of focus
level of accountability
as is evident over the visual below.
And there could be 4 different classifications based on the type of teams whether they happen to be focused on
Outcomes – thinking in terms of outcomes
Outputs – thinking of outputs / features to be built / delivered
when the quantum of work a PM is tasked with could further spawn 2 other categories:
Feature-owner – delivers the feature end-to-end taking it from 0=1
Facilitator – collaborates with XfN teams influencing stakeholders to build the said feature
When a PM could be divided amongst these responsibilities and could get tasked with a variety of things, please be informed that this visual isn’t talking about one type being better / superior in any way as compared to the others. It is rather an indication of the diversity of the PM role apportioned amongst the teams they are drafted to be a part of and that could quite frankly differ from organization to organization which is also why one comes across so many different alternative versions when PMs are asked to describe what the phrase “product management” means to them.
But talking about the most successful products built and the consistency with which each of those releases get lined up at a regular cadence and how they manage to entice the users time and again, so much of it is tied to the teams themselves and when one talks of teams these things come into consideration:
Experience levels
Maturity levels
Focus of teams
Balance between team members
When that is one side of the spectrum, on the flip side there could be other sort of teams built with the superiorly qualified and experienced members but seem to struggle with delivering value consistently in spite of sticking to best practices as prescribed by the methodologies / principles they tend to follow. And it could be because they are PSEUDO TEAMs which is what a leader ought to watch out for & nip it in the bud pretty early if found.
Lets’ understand what a PSEUDO TEAM is.
Definition:
“Pseudo teams are made up of members who work interdependently in silos & lack characteristics like a shared understanding, a sense of purpose, open communication & a commitment to teams’ as much as the org’s success”
As you can see from the above visual the pseudo team is loitering at the bottom & is placed the farthest from the high-performing teams which could rightfully be considered as opposites.
Identifying a pseudo team could just be as easy as tapping a few of those metrics representing team’s health pointing to near perfect (if not totally perfect) alignment & also the ones that pertain to the performance of the product in the markets.
The one real question leaders ought to pop & repeat it at a regular cadence is:
→ are we even a good team / are we just a bunch of coworkers / in the worst case a pseudo team?
Remember:
good teams are aligned on goals & find out ways to get there come what may
good teams have a sharp focus on outcomes & think about the higher purpose when they have to collaborate & bail each other out of their miseries
good teams are conscious about the big picture, the value addition to the end users & know how to uphold it at all times