Transcript

0:10 Transitioning a group of individual contributors to a team with shared responsibilities can boost work productivity and independence, improve personal relations, and leave colleagues more motivated and happy. It can also be very, very hard to.

0:36 Hello, and welcome to Product Nuggets. I'm Thomas Essl, and today I'll dig into how to pull off this feat of sharing responsibilities across your team. Working in such a team does not mean having a team of leaders in which everyone tries to come out most influential. It means taking collaboration to the max. It means that everyone in your team cares about what your team is trying to achieve, is to take a proactive role in shaping the team's direction, and is to equal measure held accountable for the team's success.

1:14 Before we dive into just exactly how to make this happen, let's take a moment to think about why this is important. These points are all related. So don't get too hung up on divisions.

1:24 The first main benefit is increasing autonomy. If you create an environment where everybody on your team has a shared sense of ownership and responsibilities, you decrease the risk of having a single point of failure. You don't want to be in a situation where just because somebody is sick or on holiday or has left the company, everybody else or at least a few other people are unable to operate because they no longer understand what they need to be doing next. You want everybody on the team to have that sense driven by a shared understanding of your team's mission. And that's what's going to help you avoid a whole range of risks related to not having team members being as autonomous as they can be.

2:14 Next, that helps people to go beyond their craft. That means being really good at what you're doing, but also having an understanding of why you're doing what you're doing. That really helps get people to care about their work as well. You may have experienced times in the past where you were just asked to do things and didn't really understand why. And if that was the case, I'm guessing it didn't feel great, right? You were probably somewhat frustrated about that, or at least not highly motivated to actually deliver on this task. But if you have an understanding as to why you're asked to do something, or even better, you understand yourself what you need to be doing next than that can really help drive that motivation and get you just more excited and happy about your work.

3:07 The free-flowing of information and shared knowledge that is driven by a shared sense of ownership and responsibility really helps avoid a whole range of pitfalls. And I mean that in a strategic way. Imagine you have a team where maybe one person is calling all the shots and everybody else is, you know, slightly intimidated or at the very least, doesn't really understand what's going on. Those people are not going to be very likely to speak up if they feel like the project is heading in the wrong direction. You might want to encourage the discourse and free sharing of knowledge but also opinions. Whenever your team makes a dramatic decision, you want everybody to feel confident that their opinion is gonna be heard and valued and considered. Those opinions tend to only be raised if people feel personally invested in a project.

4:06 Decreasing that sense of hierarchy can also help with lowering a chance of conflict and resentment on a personal level between team members. If you are as responsible for a project as everybody else, you might be less likely to blame someone else if things go wrong. As I said, it's the team's responsibility. That's why I find that having this shared sense of responsibility really helps keep arguments professional and less personal because there are there aren't these like awkward dynamics that come with very hierarchical structures.

4:49 What all of this boils down to is it's just more fun to work that way. I found that when teams really see each other as equals contributing equal amounts of effort and becoming known for the specific skills and value that they bring to the team, that's just the foundation of some like really good dynamics that you can have. It just feels really good to own a project together rather than just be told what to do or not really knowing what to do.

5:25 I think that often, people who are perceived as not really caring about their work, just haven't really been given the opportunity to do so and might not be the types of people who are willing to speak up about such issues. So I think that's ironically where it is the responsibility of everyone in the team to make sure that everybody else is heard and included in this kind of way.

6:18 Creating a sense for shared ownership is part of building your team's culture, and shaping that always takes time. Don't expect to have a meeting in which you decide to share responsibilities and then immediately jump into that mode. It's an altogether different way to approach your job for everyone on your team. And so you'll have to just keep working on it and be patient. And of course, it's always important. But I found that there are a few points in the product lifecycle where it matters most or at least where there's a greater opportunity for changing your practice in order to increase that sense of sharing.

7:06 One of them is the point at which you're drawing out the framework for your team's existence. So your vision, your mission, your principles, all this sort of stuff. You gotta balance input and feeling of ownership from everyone with retaining the ability to act fast and decisively. And what I mean with that is if you have a very large team, there might be some parts that you're deciding with a small group of leaders, while you need to be still really careful that everybody else on the team is given the opportunity to be heard. And to address this, you might think about a whole range of different interventions, you might host workshops with smaller groups. One thing that I've tried once was while iterating through a team's mission statement, I kept putting it on a whiteboard, every iteration was put up there and changed. And people were encouraged to anonymously add comments on it, strike stuff through, write alternatives. And especially in the early days that anonymity can be really valuable. Because again, when you're just starting out kind of moving in that really democratic product development direction, people might not yet feel comfortable to have this level of discourse, especially when it comes to points where there might be disagreeing with what might be perceived as a more mainstream view. So thinking about how those opinions can still be included in the process can be really helpful.

8:57 Next on this sort of timeline that we're venturing through is the point in time where you set long term team goals. And that might be in the form of objectives and key results. Episode One of Product Nuggets is about exactly this topic. So if you'd like to get a little bit more detail, then go back and have a listen. Basically, if you want to fulfil that goal of having objectives be set by your entire team, you need to set them up such that they are actually able to do that. If they are not, then maybe it's time to go back and revisit the business and user logic behind why you are moving in the direction that you are.

9:43 One much smaller and more frequent point in time where this entire topic becomes relevant is when you are setting your sprint objectives. And really, one way of doing that that I've really enjoyed is that not anyone person is setting those sprint objectives. Rather, every member of the team is setting their own before you come together as a group, and then you have a conversation about whether they need to be more aligned with each other or where there are some dependencies. But fundamentally, in theory, if everybody knows exactly in which direction your team wants to move, then they should also be able to know what the next most important thing is that they could be doing to get the team there.

10:33 Getting even smaller on the time scale, let's look at daily stand-ups and just the general workday. I think one way in which you can encourage behavior that is more outcome-focused, is by asking a lot of why-questions and listen. When your colleagues say that they're performing a certain task and you ask them why they're doing that, that is kind of like a forcing function to make them think about how this particular activity is moving the team forward. So the more you do that, the more that it kind of becomes natural.

11:08 If you have retrospectives, that can be another really good moment to make a point of sharing responsibilities. At the end of a retrospective, you probably come up with a to do list of things you want to improve, stop doing, start doing etc. So just make sure that those activities get shared as well.

11:29 One thing that can be really helpful as well is to increase every team members visibility outside of your own team. For example, when you interact with users and you're doing user research, you're doing sort of customer service, then rotate people through those activities and responsibilities to make sure that everybody gets the same degree of interaction with stakeholders or users. Once that happens, they get the sort of direct contact with the impact that they're having. And that can really motivate folks to step up and take on more shared responsibility as well.

12:14 And lastly, riffing off the topic of sort of contact with the outside world, share the credit. Whenever there is a presentation or a meeting, make sure you invite relevant members of your team. If there is sort of like a major release or anything of the sort, and you're presenting to the rest of your company, have everybody there. Have everybody present their bit and make sure that they're prepared to do so as well. And that again, can really help people identify themselves with the work that they're putting out.

12:50 So these are all different moments during your product's development lifecycle, which present an opportunity to grow this culture of shared ownership. But work isn't just work, we're also people and another thing you can do is to generally improve the bond that you are having between each other. Let's do some team socials, let's go all out for some kind of like activity, maybe share something about our personal lives and all that to kind of bond all team members together. I might do an episode on this in the future.

13:26 Showing others appreciation for whenever they did actually step up and take on more than their actual sort of day to day activities also can go very, very far. It can be a little token of appreciation or just some kind words.

13:43 And finally, lead with example. Of course, everything that is cultural best brushes offer to others if we do it first. So the next time you run a project, think about how you can demonstrate to everyone around you that you really understand why everybody's in the room and what you're trying to do and how that influences the work you're giving yourself on a daily basis.

14:19 If you liked this episode, please subscribe and rate it on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcast. It really means a lot to me. I'd also love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts on the show. You can get in touch with me via Twitter @Thomas_Essl, or email me to hello@thomasessl.com. Product Nuggets is produced by me Thomas Essl. The theme song is Aeronaut by Blue Dot Sessions.

14:45 Any opinions expressed in this episode are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any current or previous employers. Thank you for listening. Till next time!

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