As companies shift from startup to scale-up, the product development team must undergo a major shift when it comes to mentality around releasing product updates and features. In the startup phase, product teams deliver at high-speed iterations, and as companies grow into the early scale-up phase, delivery slows slightly but is still relatively fast. After the launch, these teams can then return their full attention to building the next product or feature. When companies reach the growth/scale-up phase however, delivery can slow down immensely, taking many months to build product features and introduce them to customers. As companies scale, this timeline simply no longer works.
Customers need to see incremental value on a regular basis or they could lose trust in the company or product. This means seeing new features or capabilities that address any existing pain points built and rolled out more frequently. Customers don’t want to wait (and in some cases can’t wait) many months for a “complete” refresh of the product that includes multiple updates and new features. As companies scale, product teams need a culture overhaul to adjust and deliver against these expectations.
Resistance to Change
In a startup, it’s expected and understood that building a new product from the ground up takes many months, albeit via quick feature iterations and experimentation. Many product developers get accustomed to the startup environment, where teams can dedicate their entire working hours to solving one problem: Building the product. As a company scales, the responsibilities of the product team expand. They now have to support customers in using the product, in addition to working on new product updates and features.
It becomes much harder to predict how long it will take to actually deliver the next product iteration because there are more processes built into a larger company than in the startup stage. Plus, there are more problems to solve as more and more customers are onboarded, and all of this time spent resolving customer issues or navigating company processes and procedures takes time away from actually developing.
Along with these very real challenges that can impede the rate of innovation and new features, there can also exist among product teams a mentality of “this is how we’ve always done it, we can’t go any faster.”
How Tech Leaders Can Successfully Effect Culture Change
Depending on the organization, the responsibility of successfully leading a culture shift among the product team could fall to various individuals – the CPO, VP of product development, product manager, etc. But regardless of the specific title, to be an effective leader, you can’t assume you know all the answers. Start by having one-to-one conversations with numerous members on the product/engineering team. Ask for their input and understand, from their perspective, what is working, what’s not working, and what ideas they have for how to accelerate product release timelines.
After conducting one-to-one discussions, sit down and correlate the information. Where are the common denominators? Did multiple team members make the same suggestions? Identify the roadblocks that are slowing down the product team or standing in the way of delivering incremental value on a more regular basis. In many cases, tech leaders will find that their team already knows how to fix the issue – they just need permission to do things a bit differently and adjust company policies/procedures to better support a more accelerated timeline.
Talking one-on-one with team members also helps resolve any misunderstandings around why the pace of work must change as the company scales and accumulates more customers. Product engineers often have a clear vision of what the end product should entail, and they want to be able to deliver on that vision. They need coaching to understand that getting new features or capabilities into the hands of customers sooner actually helps to achieve this goal faster, as you can gain valuable feedback from customers and learn what works/what doesn’t in real-world use cases.
To ensure that your actions as a tech leader and the changes you’re implementing with the product team are having the desired effect, conduct sentiment surveys of team members before and after implementing new policies and changes. Ask the right questions to ensure sentiment around autonomy, speed of work and job satisfaction are all trending in the right direction. Asking these questions are equally vital as actually seeing an acceleration in product delivery. If you’re successfully speeding up the timeline, but making the entire product team miserable in the process, that’s a clear sign the approach still needs tweaking.
Meet regularly with team members regardless of hierarchy to ensure everyone has the same access to leadership and feels comfortable expressing ideas and concerns. These regular meetings also help build transparency and ensure product team members understand how the work they’re doing directly impacts the larger company vision and overarching business goals.
As a technology leader, it is critical to build trust, transparency and a sense of autonomy within your team – all aspects that stem from regular communication and seeking feedback. Some team members will resist the culture change at first, either not believing that a different way of doing things can lead to positive outcomes, or feeling uncomfortable with a new set of expectations.
Exhibit empathy with your team, give people room to sit with the uncomfortableness for a time, and once the tide has turned, step back and allow the team to do their jobs with autonomy.
