Main image of article 5 Tips for Creating High Performing Product Teams

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You’ve got a team, but the group's got some quirks. That's all okay if they've got the stuff that will make them high performing. Actuation Consulting's study, the “five factors of high performing product teams,” was a must attend at the 2012 Silicon Valley Code Camp conference at Foothill College in Los Altos, Ca. You can request a full copy of it; it's worth the read. We also had a chance to speak with Greg Geracie, Actuation's president. Here are some highlights:

High performing product teams need the following:

  1. High degrees of executive involvement: Instead of having one executive, there needs to be more than one higher-up who engages the team.
  2. Managing the transition from development to ongoing support and launch: If there is a single person that has accountability, there is a higher likelihood that the team will succeed.
  3. Onboarding new employees to the product team: If you don’t sink enough resources into the new guys, you’ll fail.
  4. Make sure the product team is aligned with the company’s overall goals and objectives: Fifteen percent of responding product teams said they had a portfolio plan in place and only 14 percent had multi-year strategies. Absence of these is an indicator that you’re not performing at a high level. Of those organizations that did have plans in place, only 50 percent said they do it effectively.
  5. Make sure you have the right people on the team: Forty two percent of respondents said they had the right people on the team. This breaks down when you look at the actual launch process because it’s typically under-resourced and doesn’t have the appropriate people on deck.
Geracie added that the biggest surprise from the study, was that the majority of organizations are using blended methodologies to produce their products. If you listen to industry buzz, it’s agile that’s getting the marketing noise. But they found that 53 percent are actually using some combination of agile and waterfall. Image: Working Meeting [Bigstock]