Wartime Product Leadership lessons
I’ve spent most of my career working in the travel industry. I’ve worked through recessions, SARS, 911, the financial crisis, seen the sad demise of Monarch, Thomas Cook and now the unprecedented impact of Coronavirus. What I have learned is travel is a highly resilient sector — people love to take holidays. It will bounce back, but it will take time — first there has to be the ability to travel, but that is meaningless without the confidence to travel. The world is a changed place and I believe businesses are changed forever too.
Travel businesses, like many other sectors, are having to think on their feet and react quickly to respond to unprecedented levels of cancellations and virtually zero new bookings. So what does this mean for Product teams, and specifically product leadership?
With the majority of our product & engineering teams furloughed and operating with a skeleton caretaker team only, here’s my top 10 learnings from recent experience of this crisis:
A crisis calls for pragmatism and being truly agile.
- Tear up the roadmap & OKRs. Once the instruments to drive direction & focus, now feel obsolete. They are not required in this environment — its a lighter, rapid development that’s needed. The landscape has changed and the tools to work with have changed along with it. And when you review them in the cold light of day how much of them seem irrelevant, superseded by a new world. When we’re through this I doubt very much we will all pick up from where we left off…
- Simplify, simplify, simplify. This is no time for superfluous features, this is about building the minimum you need at each stage. It’s MVP at its best. Constraints on time, resource and runway force brutal decision-making.
- ‘Just enough’ process. With most of the workforce furloughed, you are stripped back to the bare bones and we’ve found the same applicable to process. Daily stand-ups have survived; they are critical to ensuring the team left are crystal clear on the goals in a rapidly-moving landscape. We introduced an end-of-day hangout for the team too — a wrap up of the days work, and a way to check-in on the team’s wellbeing.
- Documentation. Arguably more important in this scenario. You’re making significant changes at pace. You’re only a small team. When your furloughed colleagues are back in town they need to understand what has happened, why and when.
- Small is beautiful, action-biased more so. When faced with building your caretaker team, think breadth and depth of knowledge — you don’t need a big team, but you do want maximum flexibility and a bias to action.
- Sleeves rolled up, hands dirty. This is not a time for layers of hierarchy and management. It’s hands-on. It’s working alongside your team, everyone has a part to play including you. I have witnessed great camaraderie and human connection between the team left working.
- Keep others feeling connected. Whilst a caretaker team may have formed a tight bond, you still need to consider your furloughed team. They may feel disconnected, out of the loop — so make the effort to share updates, have an open, drop-in call where they can catch up informally on any news. Think about how you will re-establish working relationships once normality returns, consider what the ‘new normal’ will be.
- Have a co-captain. If you can, form an alliance with another leader to co-captain the wartime mission. Myself and our CTO have been side-by-side in leading and working with our small caretaker team. We’ve divided and conquered on tasks, we’ve tag-teamed in calls, and we’ve kept each other’s morale up when the other is low.
- Cross-functional disciplines cooperation. Something to take forward into peacetime. Operating in a crisis, at fast pace, necessitates strong communication and collaboration between disciplines — the left arm needs to know what the right arm is doing at all times to keep aligned.
- Decisions, decisions, decisions. I’m not going to apologise for repeating the words here. Rapid decision making is critical — so you need to be prepared to make the call. Indecision is fatal.
Having reflected on the learnings, I would add an 11th — and that is watch out for burnout amongst your caretaker team. The team are likely to be highly-driven, fuelled by the mission ahead of them and possibly feeling the pressure upon them — I have observed a tendency to over-work in this environment. So look out for your team and for yourself, know when to call it a day and take a breath, be deliberate and lead by example!
And finally, whilst you are likely to be very much head-down on the task in hand, you need to look up — what does life after the crisis look like, how will customer behaviour change, what are the risks you face and the opportunities that may arise. You don’t want to be a sitting duck, nor miss the boat when recovery returns.
Many of these learnings apply in peacetime too — so may be it’s just a very good/painful reminder of what’s important.
Thank you for reading. I’d be very interested in hearing others’ experiences of leading product teams at this time.
