Being A Successful Product Team Is A Marathon, Not A Sprint

Saga Lundqvist, Boris Emorine at UXDX Community: Netherlands. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPh8FbZkyBc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introducing the Collect team at WeTransfer

[00:00:04] Saga: UXDX, we are very happy to be here in the midst of everything that is happening around us. We are hoping that you are all staying safe out there. We are happy that you joined us today to hear us talk about being a successful product team. My name is Saga Lundqvist and I'm a senior product designer here at WeTransfer.

[00:00:25] Boris: Hi everyone, and my name is Boris and I'm a software engineer also working here at WeTransfer. Together with our product manager Sam, we are the team leads for the Collect product.

[00:00:36] Boris: First we wanted to talk really briefly about WeTransfer. WeTransfer started as a very small file sharing service back in 2009 and is now a global company with multiple products, with tools to move ideas. It serves over 50 million unique users all over the world, and the team has around 13 nationalities in four offices: Amsterdam, which is the headquarters, New York, Los Angeles, London. And currently everyone's working remotely.

[00:01:05] Boris: So one of those products is Collect, which Saga and I work on. Collect is a tool that lets you save anything and fuel your ideas. To keep it very simple, it lets you add content from multiple sources, like images, maybe links, maybe music, and sync the content across multiple devices, share that content and collaborate on that content. Collect is available on iOS, Android, macOS and also on the web, so we support a wide range of different platforms.

[00:01:33] Saga: All the teams at WeTransfer work cross-functionally and are autonomous, so they can set up their own schedule. As an example, in the Collect team, this is how we are set up. We are three designers, one PM and nine developers. There are two product designers that work full circle, so we work as generalists, covering everything from research to wireframing, to interaction design and visual design. And then we also work with one brand product designer that focuses more on the brand.

[00:02:14] Saga: And on the engineering side, we have three iOS engineers, two Android engineers, two back end engineers and one front-end engineer. On top of that, we also work with the shell tech team, who are at a different level for WeTransfer but are our helpers, and we also have the architecture guild, which is also going to help us. And we also work with our horizontal teams, which is user research, analytics, copy, studio, marketing, support. Each of these horizontal teams has a dedicated Collect person that will join our meeting when relevant. And here you can see our interactions with each other. They're happening very frequently and can also be a little bit complex.

The values behind a high-functioning team

[00:03:00] Boris: All right, so now that we've introduced the context of our team and the context of WeTransfer, we wanted to talk more generally about what makes a high-functioning team flourish. Today we're not going to define what a high-functioning team is, because there is no really good generic way of doing that. It really depends too much on external factors, like the area of expertise and those kinds of things. So instead, what we're going to try to do today is to provide what we believe is the most important set of qualities.

[00:03:30] Boris: We've worked in many different product teams before, and we've identified key values that we really believe are essential to building a healthy team. So the first one is vision, introspection, communication, time fragmentation, psychological safety, trust and finally personal improvement. So this is the structure of the talk for today, and we're going to go a little bit more in depth for each one of those and talk about why we believe they are so important.

[00:03:57] Saga: So the first thing that you want to have for high performance is to have a strong vision. You want to hold everyone committed and aligned to the value the product is giving. You need the team to understand the goal of the problems you're trying to solve, and also how do you get to that vision. And the vision will also help your team focus when the times are challenging or uncertain. One thing that we learned to keep in focus is also to keep everyone working on the same feature, even if it's small. We learned that keeping everyone working towards the same goal is really important and makes the team work better, and they stay more focused.

[00:04:44] Saga: There have been times when we don't really know where to go, where we're standing at this crossroads, and the Collect team wanted to go in one direction and the leadership and the stakeholders wanted to go in a different direction. For example, should we go back to the old WeTransfer value proposition, which was all about sending large files, or should we move on with this new value proposition that the Collect mission has? Times like this can be tough and affect the team negatively, but having an aligned mission helped the team stay put and keep pushing forward. Now where we can see a higher engagement with the app, we also think that keeping our mission steady was a win for us and also for the company.

Introspection: retrospectives that change how you work

[00:05:37] Boris: So this brings us to our second point, which is about introspection. Every team needs a way to look back and to reflect. This is how we can learn from our mistakes, and this is how teams grow. Most of the time nowadays this is done through the retrospective meeting, which I believe is the most important meeting. It should really influence and set up every other meeting you have, and it should really guide you to establish and revisit behaviors that work for your team.

[00:06:07] Boris: So in our opinion, we believe you should do a retrospective at least once every few sprints with everyone. That's really important, to evaluate how the team is doing and how it is currently set up. Make sure that every team member feels comfortable sharing their thoughts. You really need to create the safety for that, and you also need to make sure that everyone has a chance to be heard. It's usually a good idea to encourage sharing those topics of discussion before the meeting happens. These meetings should really be the meetings where a lot of new ideas are born.

[00:06:40] Boris: Finally, on top of regular retrospective meetings, we also believe that it's a good idea to have retrospective meetings that are more specific about very focused topics. A good example for that is to discuss how building a specific feature went. So we try to go through the timeline and define what worked, what didn't work, and all those kinds of things.

[00:06:59] Boris: For Collect, the team meets once every couple of weeks, which is how long our sprints are, for about 30 to 40 minutes at the end of each sprint. Everyone is encouraged to prepare items to discuss before the meeting. We usually just follow a very simple pattern, which is the start, stop, continue pattern, where we start discussing about topics we should start doing, topics we should stop doing and topics that we should continue doing. So it's a really great place for us to raise topics like what went well, what didn't in the last sprints. We'll evaluate the tools we've been using and we'll evaluate how we do communication, for example.

[00:07:34] Boris: So we're really trying to address issues immediately, and we are really open and flexible to change and to try new ways of working. This is really important. You should really not be afraid to try things even if they don't really work. You just evaluate it during the next retrospective and see if we should continue with it.

[00:07:54] Boris: Our stand-up process is a very good example for that. It really has evolved a lot as the team grew, and we really believe it evolved for the better. At the beginning, when we were really small, we started by doing a stand-up every single day, and as the team grew, we realized that didn't really work for us. Then we moved on to doing stand-ups on Slack, but also that didn't really work for us, and we kept on iterating, and eventually we ended up with what we're doing right now, which works really well for the team we have, which is about 13 people. We meet every other day and we just really briefly say what we're going to be working on. So our stand-up is usually maybe five to seven minutes long at a maximum, and really no more than that.

[00:08:36] Boris: So this was really a necessary process for us to really grow as a team, and the regular retrospective meetings really allowed us to identify the shortcomings of stand-up meetings and to address those problems. So this is one way of doing introspection, with retrospectives, and we believe this is a winner, or at least works pretty well for us.

Communication across platforms and time zones

[00:08:58] Saga: And next, communication. Communication is really important, and no tool or process will work without it. It's especially important if you work with a lot of different platforms and different functions like we do. When you're working remotely like we are right now, it's also really important to over-communicate. But that doesn't mean that you have to be in video calls all day. You can use the commenting features in tools, or just other documents. Just make sure that they are accessible for everyone.

[00:09:36] Saga: Communication is something that we are always trying to improve. We are not perfect and we try constantly to improve our miscommunication and misalignments. We have been in a situation where the iOS and Android platforms built out different behaviors for a key flow, and we learned that kicking off initiatives at the same time with the whole team and keeping one clear source of truth for all platforms makes it easier for everyone to stay aligned.

[00:10:07] Saga: So we're trying to keep all platforms documented in this spec doc. Since we have multiple platforms, it's hard to always align the timing in all the implementation phases, so we learned that keeping the doc at hand is really helpful when any question comes up. The goal is that this doc will have all the decisions and answers that the developers, product managers or designers might look for, or even the horizontal teams like research, QA, support and other stakeholders interested in the feature.

[00:10:41] Saga: Nowadays we communicate the design between designers and developers through design tools like Figma, where we can discuss designs at build time, either by commenting directly in the tool or by having a call and walking through it. Collaboration between design and development has become so much easier and smoother, and it now saves us so much time.

Time fragmentation and how we run meetings

[00:11:05] Boris: So next we wanted to talk a little bit about time fragmentation. Time fragmentation is really about letting your team members do what they do best. Let your team stay as focused as possible, limit interruptions, try to shield them as much as possible from bureaucracy and everything happening outside of the team. This is a wide topic, but one of the major factors of it is meetings. Meetings need to be efficient and need to be focused.

[00:11:35] Boris: So within Collect we have a few guidelines that we wanted to share with you to talk about how we do meetings. This doesn't really apply to all of your meetings and it doesn't really apply to smaller meetings, because we consider those more like collaboration sessions. But we're willing to share that with you, not because we believe this is the best thing, but because we believe that having a list of how meetings should be done for the team is really important.

[00:12:01] Boris: So the first thing we do in Collect is we keep our meetings as a last resort. Everything should be as asynchronous as possible, and the meeting should only happen if you can't really do anything else. The second thing we wanted to talk about is the fact that for us, meetings should be really short and should be really focused, and most meetings outside of our rituals should be attended by only a few people. We don't really enforce that, it's mostly self-discipline, but for example, each discipline in our team, so Android, iOS, design, only sends one person usually to attend a meeting.

[00:12:37] Boris: The next thing we wanted to talk about is about being remote friendly. Now this is a little bit different because of the situation, but even before that we were really always trying to have all the meetings remote friendly. We don't want to have people miss out on the meeting or not be heard just because they are working from home. Those are very important.

[00:12:56] Boris: And maybe the most important one is about moderators. Every meeting that we have has to have a moderator for the meeting. The moderator has a few key points that they need to make sure of. The first thing is about simply making sure that the meeting stays on point and stays on topic and doesn't derail into side conversations. The second one is to make sure that everyone has a chance to be heard. That's really, really important. Moderators really need to make sure that everyone has been heard during that meeting. Not everyone is as comfortable talking, so they need to bring things up. And finally, the moderator needs to make sure that someone is taking notes during the meeting.

[00:13:42] Boris: Finally, every single meeting we have needs to have an agenda. The agenda describes a few things. The first thing is we try to make sure to explain what the expected outcomes of that meeting are. What are the decisions that we want out of this meeting? What kind of alignment do we want at the end of this meeting? The second thing is the agenda needs to decide who the moderator will be. And finally, usually we try to share the agenda beforehand, with the document where we have everything that's needed to be able to participate fully in this meeting, so that makes sure that everyone is on the same page when we start the meeting.

[00:14:18] Boris: So this is what we wanted to talk about for time fragmentation, and we specifically talked about meetings because we feel like it should be part of it, but of course there is more to it.

Psychological safety

[00:14:27] Saga: Another thing that's really important is psychological safety. We have worked in many product teams and we learned that having a safe, supporting environment, where everyone can voice their opinions without being afraid of a manager or a colleague being condescending or judgmental, is key for happiness. Arguments should feel healthy, and everyone's opinion should be heard and taken seriously.

[00:14:53] Saga: I've been in teams where an opinion only counts if it comes from the most senior person in the room, and that is something that we are trying to avoid. We believe that the best successes are the ones where the team doesn't feel managed. The best approach is a flat structure where an idea can come from anyone inside a team or outside a team. Everyone in the team should also feel ownership and responsibility for the team's health, so it's not only up to the team lead or the manager to keep a safe space.

[00:15:30] Saga: We try to build an understanding environment. Everyone should feel safe enough to share their ideas and thoughts, and we encourage everyone to do so. For example, we're always failing as a team and never assign blame. We rather see failure as good learning, and we encourage our team members to ask each other for help and share their pain points.

Trust, at two levels

[00:15:57] Boris: All right, so now we wanted to talk a little bit about trust. Trust is fundamental for having a successful team, and it really comes at different levels. So we're going to talk really briefly about two different levels of trust. The first level is about trust in the team. This is the trust that individual team members have in the team as an entity. Team members need to really believe that the team can and will execute against its goal and its vision. This is the glue that holds the team together. For a great product to succeed, it needs to unite engineering, design and business strategy.

[00:16:37] Boris: The second level is about trust within the team. It is the mutual trust between team members. Every team member is considered an expert in their field and has everyone's trust. So everyone is welcome to challenge and question each other's approach, but ultimately their opinion is what really matters. Even a manager shouldn't impose their view. Similarly, a PM needs to trust estimates and will not make decisions outside of those estimates.

[00:17:05] Boris: Achieving this level of trust is not easy and it's not something that's going to come overnight, but thankfully all the points we covered earlier will really help foster an environment where trust can grow. The trust in the team is reinforced by having a strong vision and alignment, as we talked about, as well as using introspection. And on the other hand, having a very transparent and honest communication style, and psychological safety, will really help generate trust between team members.

[00:17:35] Boris: Another important point is to give full autonomy. For example, in Collect we put absolutely no pressure on the progress of a ticket and trust that everyone is just doing their best at any point. We expect status reports and updates to make sure that no one's getting blocked and that the whole team can operate, but we don't track any kind of productivity metrics. We just trust everyone.

[00:18:01] Boris: And finally, the last thing we really want to touch on really briefly is about team bonding. We really believe that this is also a good way of building trust within the team. Within Collect, what we've been doing, for example, is that once in a while, pretty often actually, we meet in a cafe and we all work from that location. Just working in a different environment really brings everyone closer together, and you realize that the conversations are a little bit different, and it really makes everyone bond together in some ways. And that's also going to help you build trust within your team.

Personal improvement and play day

[00:18:31] Saga: So, personal improvement. At Collect we expect our team members to spend around an hour every day on personal improvement, and that can be anything from learning a new technology to developing more of your soft skills. We are well supported at WeTransfer with a yearly budget to do so.

[00:18:52] Saga: On top of this, we have one day a month where we dedicate a full day to fun projects, a day that we call play day. Here people can work on anything outside of Collect or the core things that they're working on, and they can work cross-department, so with team members from other teams as well, and get to know them. They can work on smaller projects, but also bigger ones that run over multiple play days. At the end of each of these days we have a presentation where everyone can present their ideas, and that is something you can see in this picture.

[00:19:36] Saga: We also try to find other opportunities for team members to explore different avenues for growth. For example, being the moderator for a meeting could be a great way for a team member to learn about leading a meeting and see if they like that. Another example would be doing interviews. It's a good way for our team members to practice their interview skills at the same time as learning about another person. We all own it at WeTransfer, so it's up to each team member to decide what direction they want to go in, and we are supported for almost anything.

[00:20:16] Boris: All right, so all these points are what we've identified as fundamental to create high-functioning teams. We see them as key ingredients to succeed, but unfortunately there is no magic recipe. Everything is very different and there are many outside factors that affect a team's set-up. So while it is impossible to manufacture a successful team, we really believe that it is possible to create an environment where they're going to grow organically. It's a process that is not easy and it's really going to require continuous care and continuous attention. So we hope you enjoyed the talk and thank you for joining us today. Let us know if you have any questions.