Collective Ownership & Product Team Excellence
When I reflect on leading and coaching product teams, team dynamics are frequently the difference between success and failure. Yes, individual personalities matter but norms and behaviors are often due to things that originate at the organizational or leadership level.
Below I want to address some of the attributes of high functioning teams, why this is critical, and some things that leaders can do to encourage better team performance.
What Makes a Team?
Product development is inherently a team activity. Almost no success is just one person's accomplishment. A product needs to address business constraints, customer needs, and technology delivery – already three very distinct disciplines typically represented by different roles. Each role brings a complementary perspective and set of skills. Often there may be additional functions involved, such as data science.
I love the definition from the HBS article The Discipline of Teams:
“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”
When a team exhibits these things they can achieve great things. I witnessed this at DoorDash, where each part of the product triad actively participated in determining priorities and requirements. One team even maintained strong momentum while a strong product manager was on maternity leave—a testament to the power of shared ownership.
Lacking a common purpose or mutual accountability is where many product teams fall short. When teams operate with siloed responsibilities or–worse–an "us vs. them" mentality between functions, they rarely achieve their full potential.
The "Us vs. Them" Challenge
A frequent challenge in underperforming product teams is tension between different functions. My least effective (and most stressful) roles were where teams were territorial about their domains and brought out the worst in others. As long as that went unresolved, the team underperformed. Rather than aligning around the same goals, these teams view their job in disconnected ways such as focusing on narrowly defined outputs:
The product manager feels responsible for hitting dates promised to stakeholders
The designer is overly focused on the product’s aesthetics
Engineers want to maximize velocity or focus on technical debt
Each is stubborn and puts up barriers if they aren’t fully convinced by the what – or how – of the team’s work
What’s often missing from each of these:
Primary focus on achieving customer and business outcomes
A shared recognition that everything else should be in service of that focus
Willingness to work constructively to resolve difficult topics together
With different agendas and misaligned goals focused on outputs, an individual can theoretically meet their goals even while the team failed to deliver material outcomes. Essentially they are acting as a delivery or feature team or even a group of individuals, not a product team. Even worse, this can create conflict between team members who are prioritizing their own goals. Regardless of which variation you see, this inhibits the team from living up to its potential and delivering meaningful value.
From "Your Job" to "Our Mission"
A key part of a transformation is when teams shift from a focus on outputs to aligning around outcomes. This is most effective when these outcomes are shared across the team, regardless of function or role. This means collective accountability where each person focuses on doing what it takes to help the team win. It encourages greater collaboration, which is one of the other ingredients of getting stronger solutions and outcomes.
When the team shares the same metrics and objectives, the conversation shifts from "I did my job" to "we succeeded (or failed) together."
When this happens, teams become both more effective and happier in their work. This is backed up by research.
Google's research on team effectiveness, codenamed Project Aristotle, found that who was on a team mattered less than how team members interacted, structured their work, and viewed their contributions. In order of importance, this included psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
A key takeaway of Teresa Torres’ research The Impact of Working in a Product Trio is "The more time people spent with their product trios, the more satisfied they were. The more often people said they had an equal say in decision-making, the more satisfied they were."
Creating High-Performing Teams
Based on my experience coaching product teams, here are five key principles for fostering collective ownership:
Align team purpose and goals. Define a meaningful common team purpose. Ensure everyone on the team shares the same key outcome and success metrics. Individual performance should incorporate contribution to team goals. These practices encourage focus, collaboration, and even constructive conflict where needed.
Invest in team building. Purposeful team-building activities help establish trust, alignment and a "we're in this together" mentality – especially during the “forming” stage of team development. It helps when people know each other as individuals and can understand each other’s perspectives. This can be a good complement to “purposing,” goal setting and planning.
Recognize and reward positive behaviors. Celebrate actions that contribute to overall team success, not just individual brilliance. The person who helps make those around them better is often creating more value than the lone genius. When this happens, demonstrate its importance. “What gets rewarded gets repeated.”
Address toxic behavior promptly. On the flip side, when someone undermines team cohesion, that makes the team less successful. They are both working against the team’s success and destroying psychological safety. It is leadership’s job to address this immediately and clearly. Otherwise, it sends a powerful message about what's acceptable in your culture and is likely to metastasize.
Shared focus on improvement. Even strong teams can always get better. This is much more likely to happen via retrospectives where the team reflects on how to become more effective, then agrees to change behavior accordingly. This is one way they can hold themselves mutually accountable.
As with many things, these start with leadership setting the tone and establishing clear direction. If leaders of teams in product management, design and engineering are not working as a team, it’s unrealistic to expect better from their reports.
The Team Sport Metaphor
If you follow sports, I’m sure you can think of teams stacked with all stars who didn’t win a championship due to poor cohesion, or alternatively a team where a team of solid players came together and significantly overperformed.
I sometimes ask teams to think about the concept of an "assist" in basketball or soccer. The player making the assist doesn't score the points directly, but they create the conditions for success.
Ultimately, there are many ways to help the team win. Sometimes a play is enabled by someone who didn’t even have the ball but did something valuable nonetheless. Like professional athletes, the most valuable team members understand that making others better can be an important part of success.
In product teams, assists might look like:
An engineer helping a product manager understand technical constraints
A designer walking through alternative approaches with developers
A product manager clearing organizational roadblocks for the team
Each of them engaging in healthy debate to identify the most important problems to solve, potential solutions to test, and delivery approach
The Bottom Line
When teams shift from "I delivered my part" to "we achieved our goal," team members experience greater satisfaction and become more effective. There are concrete steps leaders can take to enable this in their organizations as well as model this behavior.
What strategies have you found effective for building collective ownership in your teams? I'd love to hear your experiences in the comments.
Book a strategy call if you’d like to discuss how to improve the performance of your product team.
