One of the biggest lessons I learned early on in my career was that the process of building products is far too complex for any one person to do alone. Even in the age of AI, no one can be a Product Manager, Delivery Manager, UX Designer, Software Engineer, QA Analyst, Product Marketing Manager and Salesperson. These are all distinct careers in their own right with their own skills, nuances and deep bodies of knowledge. No one has enough hours in the day or years in their career to be able to master all of them, not even the mythical solopreneurs you see on LinkedIn who get up at 4am and intermittent fast for 20 hours a day.

So, what does this mean for us as Product people? It means that if we want to build successful products, we need to learn how to get the best out of the people around us. As a matter of fact, I honestly believe that this is one of the most high impact, yet criminally overlooked, traits for any Product Manager to develop.

With that said, let’s look at how to develop it.

Principles of collaboration

I’ve worked in ‘squad’ or ‘pod’ based models for most of my career. A squad is a little self-organising, cross-functional team who align to achieve a common goal. In these sorts of teams you have high autonomy and high responsibility, but low authority; you’re not actually anyone’s manager and so technically nobody in the team needs to listen to a damn thing you say.

Some people might find that frustrating, to be responsible for the value the team adds to the product, but without the power to actually make people do anything. Personally though, I loved it. It stripped away the hierarchy, and that felt more pure somehow.

That’s not to say I think we should remove hierarchies from organisations in general, I don’t, but the flat nature of the squad meant I couldn’t just force people to begrudgingly do what I said then have them resent me for it afterwards. I needed to work in a way that encouraged the best in the people around me, not threatened it out of them, and I liked that a lot more.

I had to find ways to get the best out of people and foster genuine collaboration.

Over time through experience, experimentation and by reading some excellent books (don’t worry fellow nerds, I’ll mention them in this article where relevant), I began to develop some ideas on what worked and what didn’t.

I’ve tried to codify them into some principles:

  1. Honesty & Trust
  2. Ownership
  3. Communication
  4. Care

Let me break down each one in more detail.

Honesty & Trust

If you’re going to get the best out of your team, they need to trust you. Nobody ever looked at Randall from Recess and thought “I’d love to work for that guy”. Partly because he was about 8 years old, but mostly because he was untrustworthy and spent all his time stabbing people in the back. People tend to do their best work for people they like, in environments where they feel secure, and trust is a big part of that.

There are a lot of ways to build trust, but when you dig into each of them they’re all underpinned by one trait - honesty.

In practice, you have a lot of opportunities to operate honestly as a Product Manager. Here are a few of my favourites:

  • Being open about the constraints and challenges we’re working in, what I know and don’t know, and any assumptions I’m making.
  • Reporting accurately on progress towards agreed metrics/KPIs, and any respective shortfalls. Not brushing any misses under the carpet.
  • Setting up a regular retrospective sessions and encouraging everyone to contribute about anything and everything. Setting the tone by speaking candidly myself first and most importantly, making sure people know this is a safe space to share how they really feel with no adverse repercussions.

At this point in the article some people may be heavily disagreeing. There seems to be a prevailing belief that anyone in a leadership position (either direct leadership as someone’s line manager, or the sort of indirect leadership that you end up with as a Product Manager) should be a relentlessly positive cheerleader of everything the business does, and that being open with the people below you is seen as poor leadership.

In my professional opinion that belief is utter horseshit.

As much as I agree that leadership does bring with it additional responsibilities, and one of those is to set the tone and attitude, I also think that should come from a genuine belief in the mission and company, which means being honest enough to challenge what you disagree with to ensure you’re steering the company in a better direction. People aren’t stupid, and masking how you feel when times are stressful and things aren’t going well will either be seen as blind delusion or an outright lie. Most likely the latter. Your team will see you as some kind of corporate robot and feel emotionally disconnected from you.

Sticking your head above the parapet and being vulnerable enough to say things as they are (carefully and respectfully of course) however, now that’s a trait that builds trust. People will follow someone like that, and people do their best work for someone they believe in.

Ownership

There’s two sides to the ownership that I think is essential for fostering solid collaboration; the ownership you take yourself and the ownership you afford to others. I’ll talk about the latter first.

As Product Managers we often benefit from information that a lot of other roles don’t have; strategic decisions, organisational changes, competitor research, user research, product data, resource constraints, stakeholder requests. The list goes on and on.

While all of this information absolutely should be available to all roles equally, in my experience across many different organisations, it just isn’t. Communication is siloed, Engineers are just left to code without knowing why what they’re building is needed, UX Designers know all about the user research but not the screaming stakeholder requests.

The problem is that this information is what you’re using to make decisions, without it people are just blindly having to do what they’re told without ever knowing why. How is anyone supposed to feel engaged in an environment like that? If you just give people tasks with no context, they’ll just feel like they’re in a feature factory and eventually, they’ll begin to act like it too. They’ll just do their piece like they’re told. They won’t collaborate, because why would they? They have no understanding of the overarching info from the wider organisation, so why would they speak to the wider organisation while working?

If you want a motivated and collaborative team, you need to share this information you’re privileged to have. Here’s how:

  • Communicate the product strategy far and wide - this is going to be the key piece of information that explains the ‘why’, so shout about it.
  • Put the context in every Jira ticket - don’t just prescribe the ask, explain why it’s needed and how you decided that, the value it adds to the users, how it makes the product better, which KPIs or metrics you believe it’ll move the needle on.
  • Share in your retrospectives - carve out time at the start of every sprint retro to share any new info you’ve learned that might be pertinent to the team.
  • Bring them along - your UX Designer is likely already in your user research sessions, but your Engineers likely aren’t. Offer for them to come along and if they’re keen, clear it with their manager for them by explaining the value it will add.

Don’t treat them like mushrooms by keeping them in the dark. Empower them with the information and context they need to take ownership. Ownership leads to engagement, which leads to wanting to do the best possible work, which leads to wanting to collaborate to make that happen.

Next, I’ll talk about the ownership for you to take.

If you’ve not read Jocko Willink’s book ‘Extreme Ownership’, do yourself a favour and stop reading this blog to go and read that instead. It’s one of my favourite books ever and should be required reading for anyone in a leadership capacity, even a low-authority leadership role like Product Management.

The basic premise is, as the title suggests, you take extreme levels of ownership over everything. UX Designer created designs that don’t look like what you’d discussed? You should have briefed them better. Engineers completely underestimated the effort required to implement a solution and now you’re behind schedule? You should have broken the task down more to make it easier to estimate and baked in contingency to the timelines.

Naturally, this sounds absolutely terrifying and incredibly stressful, and whilst this is a very high level of personal responsibly to take, responsibility and opportunity are often the same thing. You will make yourself a better product person by taking this level of ownership. “But at what cost Andrew” you’re undoubtedly shouting at your screen right now. Well, less than you might think. Let’s look at the opposite scenario; your UX Designer messes up and you immediately point your finger at them and shout “your fault!”. The most natural reaction for someone in that position is to defend themselves, which usually results in them pointing their finger straight back at you and saying “no, your fault!”. Great, now we have a blame game and everyone hates each other. Is this a good way to get the best out your team?

Alternatively, if people see you taking ownership of what you could have done better in the situation, they’re far more likely to do the same themselves. Now rather than blaming each other, everyone pulls together, focuses on what they themselves can improve on, the product gets better and ultimately everyone trusts each other more because they know that when times get tough they won’t just turn on each other.

That doesn’t sound so stressful after all, does it? That’s one of the dichotomies of extreme ownership, it seems like the harder option but it leads to an easier life.

So, give your team the opportunity to take ownership, take extreme ownership yourself, and watch the trust and collaboration in your team grow.

Communication

I’ve touched on this indirectly with the other principles so I’ll keep this one brief, but its important enough to warrant its own callout. Communicating openly, clearly and often with your team is a key trait for building collaboration.

I always aim to tell my team any pertinent information as soon as I have it, whether that’s business updates, organisational changes, new user or product insights. Anything useful that I know, they know. If your team feel like you’re withholding information, it will create a ‘them and you’ vibe rather than an ‘us’ vibe, and that’s one of the quickest ways to erode trust and undermine all the hard work you’ve put in to create a collaborative environment up to this point.

Care

As I touched on right at the start of this article, you can’t build good products alone. That means that the success of the people around you is a prerequisite for your success, so I strongly suggest you do everything you can to help them attain it.

If you do, not only will you get a warm fuzzy feeling inside but you’ll also build a high performing team, who in turn build better products, and who will remember how you helped them and therefore will help you in the future. It’s a win-win-win.

What does this look like in practice? I start by asking questions, and genuinely wanting to know the answers. Use your retrospectives as an opportunity to actually dig into challenges, then go and solve them for them. Is there anything you’re doing that’s making their job harder? Is there any training they want that you can help secure budget for? What can you do to help them secure promotions and pay rises?

If someone in your team does something well, sing their praises loudly and publicly, both within the team and the wider business. If they make a mistake, support them rather than blame them, and acknowledge your contribution to it (as a Product Manager the extremely high level of responsibility means you’ve probably always contributed to any mistake your team made in some way, sorry). Never throw any of your teammates under the bus to management to protect yourself.

Show them, over and over again in whatever way you can, that you care about them both professionally and personally, and watch how the level of cohesion in your team skyrockets.