Exploring Traps and Challenges Faced by Product Teams

David Pereira is a product leader, speaker and regular blogger who loves to contribute to the wider Agile and Product communities with insights from his own career, including some of the mistakes he's made and not just the successes. David was recently tempted into writing a book, the newly released "Untrapping Product Teams" where he provocatively rails against "bullshit management" and tries to inspire us all to affect change in our organisations (but step-by-step). We talked all about themes from the book, as well as what it meant to have an endorsement from Marty Cagan.

Episode highlights:

 

1. When someone starts doing something differently and delivering value, people get curious

Sometimes it can seem almost impossible to change things yourself, but you don't have to change it all at once. If you can start showing the impact of smaller changes that deliver value then you can get both interest and buy-in from stakeholders. This gives you permission to try more things.

2. The more bullshit you handle the less value you create

David coined the term "bullshit management" to represent the work you have to do in many low-performing product companies. Bullshit management is where you spend all your time working on the work around the work, prioritising requirements with no context and being actively prevented from delivering value to your users, and it has to stop.

3. Collaborative flow trumps coordinative flow

Coordinative flow is when you spend more time in meetings about the work and struggle to align people than you do actually doing the work. It's focused on outputs and gives you someone to blame when it goes wrong. Collaborative flow is when teams come together to work on problems... collaboratively and use what they know to uncover what they don't know.

4. You don't need to die on every hill

Sometimes you have to hold your nose and do things in ways that you don't believe are effective, or actively destructive. This is part and parcel of the job and something you have to get used to. As long as you can find small ways to make an impact in some areas, you can give way in other areas. Rome wasn't built in a day.

5. If you really want to make an impact, ask more questions than you give answers

We're all primed to look clever and give answers as quickly as we can but product people need to think deeper than that and ask good questions. Why do we really need that? What does success really look like? What don't we know?

Check out "Untrapping Product Teams"

"Untrapping Product Teams guides you to simplify what gets unintentionally complicated and equips you to overcome dangerous traps while steadily driving customer and business value. This isn't just another book about product management. It's a thought-provoking guide filled with simplicity, encouraging you to act today for a better tomorrow."

Check it out on Amazon.

Contact David

You can catch up with David on LinkedIn or check out his website.

Related episodes you should like:

 

• Survive the Feature Factory by Applying Product Thinking to Product Thinking (John Cutler, Product Evangelist & Coach @ Amplitude)
• Build High Growth Products by Following the Product Science Success Path (Holly Hester-Reilly, Founder @ H2R Product Science)
• Pragmatic Digital Transformation in Traditional Industries (Dan Chapman, Director, Product Line Leader @ Merck)
• Optimising Product Planning with the Quartz Open Framework (Steve Johnson, Product Coach)
• Servitising Product Management & Setting Up Product Teams For Success (Jas Shah, Product Consultant)
• Surviving a Lack of Product Thinking & Riding the Product Maturity Curve (Nis Frome, VP Product @ Feedback Loop)
• Is this Seriously Game Over for Scrum? (David Pereira, Editor @ Serious Scrum)
• Transforming your Organisation to the Product Operating Model (Marty Cagan, Author "Inspired", "Empowered" and "Transformed")