Resources for product teams from industry experts
Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success. The members of a winning team are highly sought after by other teams, both for the skills they demonstrate and for their ability to help a new team develop a winning culture.
— The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, et al.
Personal mastery: Continually clarifying and refining our personal visions, and seeing reality objectively.
Building shared vision: The capacity to translate individual visions into collective visions that galvanize a group of people based on what they’ll really like to create together.
Mental models: Learning to unearth our own personal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface so that we see how they impact our actions.
Team learning: Spending time together to suspend assumptions and come up with new ideas.
Systems thinking: What causes patterns of behavior? It is a framework for seeing the whole picture instead of individual things. The purpose is to make the full picture clearer, to see patterns between components or subsystems.
Feedback: Any reciprocal flow of influence. Think of circles of influence in order to get things done, rather than linear processes.
In building learning organizations there is no ultimate destination or end state, only a lifelong journey. “This work requires great reservoirs of patience… but I believe the results we achieve are more sustainable because the people involved have really grown. It also prepares people for the ongoing journey. As we learn, grow, and tackle more systemic challenges, things do not get easier.”
— The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge
A great company doesn’t just thrive because it’s profitable; it’s profitable because it helps people to thrive. Great companies leave the world better than they found it—which is why those of us responsible for creating and building businesses must be as clear about the way we get to our destination as we are about what that destination is.
— Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when you know who you are by Bernadette Jiwa
Any data you collect helps paint a picture of your customer’s needs, wants, and interests. Though you may need to redirect your efforts when it stops working as well as it does now, your effort to connect with your customers at an emotional level should remain exactly where it’s always been—at 110 percent.
— The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk
I bet you’ve heard the saying “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” This saying stays true in the so-called “forest thinking” as well. When we analyze the intensive boundaries of a problem, considering every single aspect—or tree—of it, we can lose our focus on what matters. Instead of trying to narrow down if a particular dishwasher stopped working on Sunday afternoon, it’s more useful to see how often the dishwasher breaks down in general, how big the load is when it breaks down compared to the load when it works well, and so on. Forest thinking shows us the “on average” state of a system. To improve your forest thinking skills, try to discover similarities rather than differences—especially when in an organizational setting.
Just because every person has their own strengths, doesn’t mean that they don’t share some attributives—being useful for the company for instance. One person can be terrible at maintaining good relationships with customers but can be exceptionally good at critical thinking. Instead of looking at individual factors, take a look at some central questions like “What is the interaction between the aspects guiding someone’s work morale?”
— The Systems Thinker – Mental Models: Take Control Over Your Thought Patterns. Learn Advanced Decision-Making and Problem-Solving Skills by Albert Rutherford
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