Don’t Just Hire Great Product Managers, Build a Great Team
I joined Aircall in March 2020 as Head of Product. Soon after, despite the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic, Aircall raised $65M in Series C funding. The growth and product ambitions were huge and my role as a Head of Product was to help make this happen. My first focus was building the team, but not just any team: a passionate team of PMs and designers that make the product magic happen.
I hired 8 PMs and designers in the first 3 months (using tactics I described here) and I was so excited to see everyone starting work in the next months. But having everyone there was only the first step. How do you create a team that is highly effective, thrives and grows and enjoys their work?
It starts with onboarding
As a manager, and especially in a remote setting, make sure you check in often and you make yourself available for teammates. From the very beginning, provide the big picture of what you want to achieve as a business and explain how each person in the team will have an impact on that. We all want to be part of something bigger and have a positive impact, so as a leader share the challenges and the ambitions of the company and of the product.
Make sure the objectives are clear during onboarding. Give objectives that will help the teammates both gather user and business knowledge fast and build relationships with the business teams. Something that works well for us is to give new joiners an objective of attending 10 ‘client interactions’. A client interaction is a sales demo, support hour or a quarterly business review. This helps every new joiner understand the business and the clients very quickly.
Empower the team
As a manager it is important to give trust and autonomy. The fact that someone is a new joiner doesn’t mean you should check or control everything they do. Make sure that you empower your teammates from day 1.
The first step is to give context and information. Make sure the team has all the information necessary and remember that whenever you don’t feel you’re over-communicating on an important topic, you most certainly need to communicate again.
Ensure that everyone focuses on what’s important. Your role as a leader is to help everyone have a clear focus. I started a ‘focus of the week’ thread with the team so that everyone starts the week with a clear focus in mind. This is a hard exercise when you have 10 priorities you’d like to list, but it also helps you recenter.
Another important aspect is to create a safe space for everyone to ask questions and share their opinion. Encourage them to raise red flags and propose improvements. Act on these improvements yourself as a leader or empower the team to take action to improve the product or process directly.
Last but not least, do not forget to celebrate achievements. Share kudos in 1:1s, in team meetings, in company meetings… there is nothing better than feeling validated and that your work is appreciated.
Learn together
Another essential aspect of having a great team is that the teammates grow and learn new things together. We all have unique valuable knowledge, experiences and ideas we can share. But we also have questions and struggles and it is important to be able to share this with the PM peers and get feedback and ideas.
I launched a meeting that we called ‘Product Labs’, which is our space to explore product challenges, ideas and methodologies. It’s a place where everyone feels comfortable sharing and learning together. Most of the time we have a mix of pre-defined and open topics. The predefined topics will consist of a short presentation on a specific topic (roadmapping, bias in user research, AB testing, etc) followed by questions and experience sharing by other members. The team appreciates alternating the pre-defined topics with open sessions when we brainstorm topics of interest and follow by open conversation.
At the beginning I was the one ‘managing’ and proposing most of the topics (sometimes presented by me or encouraging team members to share). I chose topics that I wanted to make sure are part of the team’s mindset (like outcome based roadmaps or lean experiments) or topics that I knew one or multiple PMs were working on in different ways. This made a lot of sense while onboarding new members as it gave the sense of learning new things and having interesting conversations. When we started to gain traction, I stopped proposing topics and encouraged the teammates to share more. Another key factor in making these meetings a success is to have a ‘champion’ (other than the Head of Product) that will organise the agenda and facilitate a part of the conversations.
Learning together is an activity that goes beyond one meeting and happens on a daily basis. And in a remote setting the role of the manager as a connector is very important. In my case, I’ve managed each of the 15 persons in the team at a certain moment in time (even though it was only for a few weeks). I can now use my knowledge of their individual strengths and experiences to suggest who should talk to whom and about what.
Another key aspect of learning and thriving as a team leans in the try and fail mindset. I encouraged the team very early to try new things. For example, when I joined Aircall the team was mainly using one ‘recipe’ for prioritisation: the RICE framework. My message was that we need to think about what we are prioritising and what is the most relevant criteria. RICE can work wonders in some cases, but less in others. So we started using other models like the 2x2 prioritisation that forces us to think every time what 2 main criteria is the best for the prioritisation. This worked so well that one of the PMs took it forward and used a 2x2 with 3 axis for a prioritisation workshop with the business teams.
Get to know each other and have fun together
As a leader, you can make wonders for your team by acknowledging the importance of relationships and having fun in the workplace. Creating opportunities for this to happen and especially in a remote setting, is vital for building a great team. I am a strong believer that taking some time to build relationships with teammates and have fun at work is a way to keep high morale, improve collaboration and make your team happier and more productive.
Here are some activities that created group cohesion for my team:
- Quarterly retros: every quarter we have a different format of retro (‘I like-I wish’, Sailboat,…) and a different icebreaker and temperature check.
- Team lunches: during the ‘non confinement’ periods we were able to have lunch together at least once a month; despite Covid19 restrictions, I am mindful to propose lunch to the team as soon as we are allowed to get out of the house!
- Team buildings: at Aircall we updated our HR policy for every department to have a team building every quarter. This is a great opportunity to bring more fun and cohesion in the group and I’ve put quite some effort in finding the best activities together with the team. There is always a fun ice-breaker, a get to know each other activity and a fun activity with an external facilitator (last quarter it was a cooking class and this quarter it’s a mixology activity).
- Present my leadership style and have each teammate present their working styles. The exercise is pretty straight forward: we will each present the way we work by describing what we do, what we don’t do, what we want others to do while working with us and what we don’t want them to do. As a leader, presenting your leadership style will help the team understand how you work and what you expect from them in a very transparent way. The same goes for the team. Learning that a teammate has difficulties being on top of their game at the end of the working day will guide you to not push having the most difficult meetings together at 5pm. Or learning that a teammate appreciates checking in on them from time to time, gives you a hint on what is important to them and how you can build the relationship. All you have to do is to be honest and listen well.
Building a great team, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, is a fascinating yet challenging task and I often ask myself how do I know if we’re on the right path. The answer always comes when looking and listening to the team. And today I know we’re on the right path when I see the teammates supporting each other, taking initiatives proactively and driving execution by constantly shipping value to clients ❤️.
