How to Build High Performing Product Teams | Lessons from 15+ Years in Product with Stephanie Leue

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Sep 3, 2024

Stephanie Leue, a seasoned Group Product Manager at Ringier with over 15 years in product management, shares her insights on building high-performing teams. She reveals that only 10-20% of teams reach high performance, emphasizing trust and accountability. Stephanie discusses how emotional intelligence and support create effective teams and introduces her assessment framework using People, Processes, Purpose, and Performance. She also highlights the value of collaboration and the need for innovative approaches in product management.

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INSIGHT

High-Performing Teams Defined

High-performing teams are defined by trust, healthy conflict, commitment, accountability, and results-orientation.
Even high-performing teams experience fluctuations due to external factors like personnel or strategy changes.

ANECDOTE

Contentful's Process-Less Team

At Contentful, one high-performing team had no defined processes or strict roles.
Their shared goal and healthy conflict management allowed them to excel despite this lack of structure.

ADVICE

The Four P's Framework

Evaluate teams using four pillars: people, purpose, process, and performance.
Use this framework when starting a new role to quickly identify strengths, weaknesses, and prioritize improvements.

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Building a high performing product team is one of the hardest, but most essential tasks, for product leaders. Today, we break down how with Stephanie Leue.

Stephanie was CPO at Doodle and has over 15 years of Product Management experience at companies such as Paypal and Contentful. Currently, she is a Group Product Manager at Ringier. She’s also one of the most original product content producers on LinkedIn.

In today’s episode, we cover:

• What is a high performing team? | 2:50

• How many teams are high performing? | 11:31

• How to build high performing teams as a leader | 16:05

• How to be great at the core craft of PM | 46:30

• Stephanie’s ‘hot takes’ on PM | 1:13:40

Brought to you by:

* Zeda.io: Product discovery platform that turns VOC into product insights

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Here are the Key Takeaways:

1. High-performing Teams are Rare

Only 10-20% of teams consistently achieve high performance, defined by trust, healthy conflict management, commitment, accountability, and focus on results.

These teams can navigate changes and conflicts more quickly, but it's important to recognize that high performance is not a constant state. Even top teams have ups and downs — external factors like personnel changes or strategic shifts can impact performance.

2. Create a Framework to Evaluate Your Org

Stephanies uses the framework People, Processes, Purpose, and Performance to provide a structured approach for leaders to assess and improve their teams, especially when starting a new role.

The benefit of a framework is it allows leaders to quickly identify areas of strength and weakness, prioritize improvements, and communicate findings transparently across the organization.

3. ICP + JTBD > Personas

Build an ideal customer profile and analyzing various jobs to be done is much more effective than using personas.

The combination of these two frameworks help teams focus on solving real user problems and align various departments (product, marketing, sales) around common goals and understanding.

4. Traditional “Growth Team Stuff” is a Must for Core PMs

Core teams don’t need to move away from features. But they do need to adopt practices like proving their value to metrics — fast.

Of course, certain work does not have metrics (like quality) or takes a while (like innovation). But core teams need to be able to take the right balance of bets based on the company’s current strategy. And when metrics matter fast, they must be able to.

Check out the episode for all the nuance and details.

Where to find Stephanie:

* LinkedIn

* Newsletter

We have some great podcasts coming from Ravi Mehta, Sam Kawsarani, and Mirela Mus. I’m excited to share them with you.

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