Creating High Performing Teams

Claire Thornewill, Shruti Ramiah, Matti Klasson at UXDX Community: Europe West. Video: https://youtu.be/jzfc364qpvQ

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 panel

[00:00:00] Host: Our panelists here, we've had a great conversation already around this topic, so I'm looking forward to diving into this. We have Claire, who's a senior web performance consultant for Netcentric, which provides customer experience solutions. Claire has been in product management roles in a number of organizations, from fintech to venture capital, and you've also worked all over the world, in Sydney, Australia, to the UK and Germany, so some great perspectives on teams there.

[00:00:32] Host: Matti is head of engineering management for Nordic Entertainment, for those of you who don't know it, who are across Europe. It's a suite of streaming services and radio networks, TV and production companies. Matti has been an engineering lead and in consulting roles for a number of finance and gaming organizations, including being a studio agile director for King.

[00:00:55] Host: And finally, the lovely Shruti, who is a long-standing person that's been involved with UXDX for quite a while, previously in her role as head of product design and user research at N26, and she's spoken about her work there. She's also a lecturer at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, and she currently works as the head of design for Zalando, which is an online fashion house which I'm sure everybody is looking at at the moment. So welcome to you all.

[00:01:27] Host: Today we're going to talk about team performance and high performing teams. And to those of you who are listening, if you could have a think about, from a performance perspective, what you want to get out of this talk on a professional and personal level, on a team level and on a company level, because each of these individuals are coming from very different perspectives. So if we could firstly describe your team structure, each of you. Claire, you're in my visual screen, so I'll start with you, and then Matti you can jump in.

Three very different team structures

[00:01:59] Claire: Sure. So like you mentioned, I rejoined Netcentric, and Netcentric works in holacracy, so it's an operating system for the whole company, and instead of hierarchies we work in circles. And that then breaks down into smaller circles within circles, so you can maybe see a circle as a department. And just recently we have opened up a new department for the web performance team, essentially. So we call these departments communities, and within this community it's very, very small at the moment, and so we're trying to grow.

[00:02:43] Claire: And within this I'm in charge of building a tool for web performance. So whilst my title implies that I'm a web performance consultant, I'm actually building and doing product management for web performance tools. So that's, I guess, my team in a nutshell. We're four people in total in the community, and at the moment my product team is quite scattered across the company, because it's whoever I can get right now and when they're available and if they have time. So it's not a set team for now, and once we get more buy-in and we grow a little bit more, we will grow the team as well.

[00:03:25] Host: Great, I love that. And Matti, how about you?

[00:03:29] Matti: Yeah, so I am head of engineering management at Viaplay, which is the streaming product of the entertainment group, and we have organized ourselves across our customer funnel in three different product areas in the product organization. And in those product areas we have cross-functional product teams. At the moment we are 12 teams with 80 designers and developers across those teams that I'm overseeing, together with my team of engineering managers. And what we have to guide us in this is, we have a mission system that I talked about in my talk, that sets the guardrails of what to build and how to do it. And that guides us to be having autonomy and alignment.

[00:04:26] Host: And Shruti, tell us about your current team.

[00:04:30] Shruti: Yes, hello everyone, and thank you for that introduction, Catherine. So I've just started at Zalando in January, and figuring out the team structure has been a little bit of an adventure for me as well. We are a company of, I think when I onboarded, about 13,000 people, so it's quite a large organization. And today I went looking for some numbers around the engineering teams, product management and design, and the product insights and design team is about 140 or so people and we're growing, product management's about 250 across the organization, and engineers is 1,400 or so. So really quite a large group of people trying to work and collaborate together.

[00:05:12] Shruti: And most of you will know the customer facing experience of this, zalando.com or the app, wherever you go to shop, but there's a lot of other teams that are also B2B and B2E, so internal facing tools, but also partner and retailer facing tools. And so we have multiple organizations under the Zalando umbrella, each with their internal product, engineering, design organizations as well, but we're all peers and we connect as disciplines together.

[00:05:48] Shruti: And where I sit specifically is in a small little eight-person team called the studio, which sits alongside the core product development team for the fashion store experience, so that's the customer facing end. And the studio is really a team that's focused on running ahead and figuring out where the opportunities lie before we take the big tanker of our organization in that direction. So we're the scouts for the organization.

Is there a right size for a cross-functional team?

[00:06:18] Host: Interesting. So that is a detailed team analysis, and I'll ask you, what is the right scale of a cross-functional team? Is there a right scale for you, looking at all the organizations you worked in?

[00:06:34] Shruti: For me? Yes. I think, just having looked at it in different scales of organizations, probably when we think about cross-functional teams, it still boils down to a group of people who can collaborate and function well together, and that scales out at, you know, 10, 12 people. So you have to start breaking up into smaller groups when that happens. You want to have the optimal amount of, like, enough people to achieve meaningful shift and change, but not so big that you're spending more of your time aligning and organizing yourselves.

[00:07:11] Shruti: But then I think what's fascinating is also, once you have lots of these little bubbles of people, how do you connect all of them together and make them work in tandem with one another, pushing in the same direction? And that's where I think different scales of organizations need different solutions.

[00:07:28] Host: Yeah, it's a good point. And Matti, I'll bring you in, what are your thoughts? You mentioned about 12 on your teams. Is it an ideal or optimal size, or what would be an optimal team size for you if you weren't working somewhere?

[00:07:44] Matti: Yeah, so that's 12 teams in three areas, and the size of the teams differs. And no, it's not one size fits all, or a magic number. I think it's really good to know what is the definition of a team. So I heard this really simple thing, that two people is the smallest unit of a team, and the definition is that a team is having a shared goal and they have joint ownership on the outcome, so they need each other to achieve something. I really like that definition. And then it depends on the context, it depends on the situation, what is suitable for you.

[00:08:32] Matti: But what I've seen in my experience is that communication flows smoother if you are having smaller teams. When you're having bigger teams the communication is harder to get around, especially now in these days that we are remote, so you need to consider how to make sure that everybody is on the same page and the communication works smoothly across all the team members. So that's something to consider.

[00:09:04] Matti: And also, when you're scaling and growing and you put in more competence or more expectation on the team, and you grow that team, that increases the complexity, it also increases the cognitive load for that team. So you then might need to consider to break up the team if that's too big, or finding other supporting structure for your product teams, so they can actually deliver on the mission or the task they have been assigned.

Don't let the team structure show in the product

[00:09:38] Host: Yeah, that's a really nice one. I guess the things that stuck out to me there is, though, not one size fits all, about the shared goals and the communication. And Shruti, it reminds me of something that you mentioned in the call when discussing this topic, which was around making sure that the structure of your team doesn't show in your product. Could you explain to the audience a little bit about that?

[00:10:06] Shruti: Yeah, I think this goes to both Matti's point and my point about maintaining those good flows of communication. So I think it's common knowledge that we're all trying to build self-sufficient, autonomous teams that really have all the capabilities and the ownership to deliver into the product. So when we're leaning into that autonomy, I think what we see happening, in the phases when you're phasing out of a certain stage of organization, is you start seeing people saying, well, I'm just going to focus on the thing I can control and I can change, and it's too hard talking to those people over there, so we're just going to do what we can.

[00:10:47] Shruti: And that's when it starts to show in your product, where there's maybe different rates of change within the product, or certain parts of the experience start to silo off from other parts of the experience. So you've got to remember at the end of the day it's one product, one experience, usually, for your customers. And it's important to invest the time to work together and move together, and then that means process, that means collaboration, alignment and overheads that not all of us enjoy. But that's where we really need to make sure that the org structure and the team structure is not being represented in terms of how the product is evolving.

Claire on rejoining a company she had left

[00:11:30] Host: Yeah, really nice. Thanks. Claire, I'm going to focus on you for a minute, and your story is interesting from the fact that you've rejoined a company that you previously worked with. Now, many people, including myself, wouldn't be brave enough to make that move, and I think it's a really interesting one. So could you talk us through that, and maybe how your past product knowledge and then your updated experience has helped you influence building a better product there, and a different product?

[00:12:04] Claire: Yeah, I think a lot of anxiety comes with, I mean, it's like a holiday, right? You never revisit the same location, because you have the expectations and then you're disappointed when you go back to the same place. I would say, for Netcentric, I didn't leave in the first place because I didn't like the people or the culture, it was more of a career move.

[00:12:27] Claire: Netcentric works very much on projects, and at the time I was a requirements engineer, and how they focus is that the product owner is on the client side. So a lot of the power, at least at the time I felt like a lot of the power of the decision making, wasn't really in our hands, but it was very much in the client's hands. And a lot of our clients are quite large traditional organizations, which you can imagine is a little frustrating for agile, young and fast-moving companies. So this was one of the reasons why I left, and because there wasn't a product owner role per se at Netcentric at the time.

[00:13:10] Claire: And so I went to work at some startups as a product manager and a venture builder, and I learned a lot, because I was also working in lots of different industries. So I was working in fintech, I was working in mental health, and then I moved to another startup that was for logistics. And I think you learn a lot when you move, and particularly I think you learn a lot more when you move companies within a pandemic and you're onboarding online from home. It was mentioned in Shruti's talk as well, the onboarding from home: nothing has really changed, you're still at your desk, you're still at your computer, and so there's that kind of difficulty.

[00:13:54] Claire: So what I was missing was the people and the culture, and I guess the stars aligned and I reached out to them and I said, you know what, I really miss you, I really missed the way you're set up, where we work so autonomously in these different communities. I missed that. And by chance my mentor at Netcentric was starting to open up this new department in web performance, and said, hey, you know what, I really, really need a product owner or product manager, someone with product management skills and knowledge and background. So the stars aligned and it all worked out, and I started actually beginning of May, so it's been exciting.

[00:14:40] Claire: And the nice thing is that I have a lot of control of how we build the product. The difficulty is the lack of resources that we are given, but that's a challenge. And I guess everything that I learned along the way has just, I feel like I have a different perspective. I've seen how it can be in different companies, and I've taken these frustrations that I might have had beforehand and experienced something different, so that I have a very different perspective at Netcentric right now. Before, I felt like I was maybe young and excited — I mean, it's not that long ago — but I wanted to get my fingers on everything and have control, and now I feel like I can take a step back and really focus on what I want to achieve, which is to really build this tool, and have less of a focus of being involved with everything else that's around me.

Boundaries, accountabilities and missions

[00:15:33] Host: Yeah, it's really great. And how do you set boundaries, or what boundaries do you set for your team?

[00:15:40] Claire: I guess I cover this a little in my talk as well. I wouldn't maybe call them boundaries, but I think it was also mentioned before, to really have a shared goal and to really set some team principles, because I think it's very easy to get lost or go off on a tangent. And so I think it's super important to sit down with your team and figure out what is it that we're trying to achieve, what are our priorities, and what are our accountabilities. And this is something that also plays into holacracy at Netcentric, is that every role that you have, you define the accountabilities before you get going in this role.

[00:16:19] Claire: So every role — and you might have a few different ones in a few different communities — so, you know, I have the product owner role but I also have the community moderator role, which means I sort of manage the community itself, but every single one of these has accountabilities. So I think it kind of defines in its own circle what is expected of you, the expectations that your team has of you, and this is what your goal is. So it's maybe not a boundary, but it's definitely, that's what you're trying to achieve, that's what you're trying to reach, and you know very clearly what is expected of you.

[00:17:00] Host: Okay. And Matti, just regarding your teams and tasks, are your teams given tasks to build, or do they have input on the direction of the product at all?

[00:17:09] Matti: Yeah, so as I mentioned in my talk, it's about our mission system. So we always set up a strategy and having a mission, a vision for the company, that is our guidelines or guardrails. On top of that we have this mission system, so we give the teams the assignment of a mission, and a mission could be a problem statement or a business opportunity that we want to unpack and explore. And it's up to the team to unpack that problem statement or business opportunity and figure out what kind of bets do we need to do, or experiments we need to run, to have a better understanding of this mission, and how we can basically prove or disprove the hypothesis around that mission. So that is what we have as guardrails or boundaries for our teams.

[00:18:14] Matti: So we include them in that work, and I think that's super important to do that, to have that involvement, because that's what people want to have. They want to have this feeling of the control that we talked about a little bit earlier, that you need to have a certain control of what you're doing and how to do it, so you feel you have the ownership of the outcome, in our case the mission.

[00:18:42] Matti: And then also, we're seeing that the mission is not living forever. We say that the time span is roughly 12 months, plus minus six months, depending on that mission. What we also see, I think, is super important, is that we might have, in some cases, done the missions too fast, so it's easy to put in a little bit of whatever in that mission. So I think that's also something, a learning, that you try to keep the mission tangible and concrete, so you know when you have fulfilled that mission so you can take on another mission.

Letting people work on what they enjoy

[00:19:24] Host: Yeah, absolutely, and it ties in as well as being that autonomy, mastery and purpose that we talked about. It ties into that purpose piece. And Shruti, you've said it before about encouraging people to work on what they want and what they enjoy doing. But how do you balance letting them do what they want, versus getting the tasks done that's within their scope and their job?

[00:19:54] Shruti: Yeah, of course. Well, hopefully everyone's doing a role that they actually enjoy and they were meant to be in. And a hundred percent of the time — not always! Yes, this is true. And of course, as a good manager it's also your job to try and make sure those matches are happening, and if that opportunity is outside of your team, opening up that opportunity for your colleague is also your responsibility. So this is something that we really champion as well at Zalando, making sure that people are matched with the problems and the opportunities they enjoy and that are going to help them grow.

[00:20:32] Shruti: But the other thing I think is, we all should have a responsibility to bring a certain level of curiosity to our work, and looking at every problem and seeing what within this is interesting to me. And if you have your learning goals alongside that, and you know what are the things you're trying to grow at or you're trying to get better at, I guarantee you, if you look at the problem in an open way, you'll find an angle through which to further your learning journey or your growth journey. So it's almost, I like to encourage my team to look at their learning goals as lenses through which to look at their day-to-day work, rather than looking at it like, oh, I've got to go do this extra thing, or I've got to start this extra project in order to be able to learn. I think there's a lot of learning in your day-to-day, but sometimes you need to do some pre-work and become aware so that you can spot those opportunities.

Handling feedback from outside the team

[00:21:37] Host: I love it. So it's pushing it back on the individual to take ownership of their own agenda and finding the positive outlook on it. I also love what you said about it's the manager's responsibility to make sure that they're aligning the work with the people, too. I think that's also a very good point. Claire, how do you manage, I guess, feedback from outside of the team? How does that work for you?

[00:21:51] Claire: Well, I guess it depends what it is. I mean, I would always say, humbly listen. That's the first and best thing that you can do. And like I said, it really depends what it is, because a lot of people, particularly when it comes to the design aspect, even in product, if someone says, I don't like that color, it's like, okay, well, that's a personal opinion. However, if someone says, okay, you can't use that color for accessibility reasons, that's a why you can't use that color.

[00:22:28] Claire: And so I guess for me, why is one of the biggest questions you should ask. People always have opinions, it's always going to be that way, and that's okay. I mean, even I have my own opinions and I like to voice them as well. But I think what's super important is just to listen humbly and tell them, okay, well, we'll take that into consideration, and then really evaluate: is there more to this, is it someone's personal opinion, or does it actually have value, and can it make a difference and will it make a difference?

[00:22:59] Claire: And then really think about it, maybe do some extra research, or maybe someone has already done that and brought it. But I think it's really considering the why that is the most important thing. And I also talk about this in my talk: help people to cultivate that culture of asking why as well. So the more you ask why, the more others might start thinking about it and asking why themselves.

[00:23:24] Host: Yeah, and even what, why not. Great, that's brilliant. And Matti, with your team structure, how are the goals communicated outside of your team to other teams?

Communicating goals, and mobility between teams

[00:23:37] Matti: So we try to do that all the time in different settings. Like, we have town halls that we talked about, what we're doing. We're doing demos every second week. We have a demo with the whole product and engineering organization: see what have you done the last two weeks, and all the teams presenting that, and we talked about that. And then also, on a regular basis, we have town halls where we rally all the people around talking about our strategy, our missions, what's happening, what's next and such. I think that's the way how we try to communicate outside the teams and such, and then we encourage the teams to talk to each other.

[00:24:23] Matti: And to connect to what Shruti said before about learning, I think that's super important, to have that visibility of what's cooking in the different teams. So it's not only dependent on the managers to understand, okay, here could be a learning opportunity for you if you move to this team. The team members can see that themselves, so have that really visible and transparent across the organization. Super important, because I think also that we encourage people, when we're having new missions or we do some re-teaming, encourage people to look at that and see if that's something that you want to be part of. We encourage people to move to that team, and we can manage that.

[00:25:06] Matti: I think we need to have that kind of mobility across the teams, because sometimes you're feeling also that, when you set up this kind of system and you said you're going to have stable, autonomous teams, sometimes people felt, okay, I need to just be in my team, that is my surrounding, I'm not allowed, or I cannot move to another team, then I'm feeling that I just leave my team alone, or I just disband my team. But it's also about finding other ways to how you can grow and also contribute in the best way and stay motivated and keep performing within the company, otherwise you will do that outside the company, which is not something people want.

[00:25:54] Host: And Shruti, I see you nodding. How are goals communicated within your team? Would you agree with that?

[00:26:02] Shruti: Yeah, absolutely. Within the teams, of course, similar to what Claire mentioned as well as Matti, you receive your remit to some extent, but it's also about owning that and then figuring out what is the best way to deliver to it. So it's almost a conversation from the bottom up to the top down. Staying aligned is often about making sure that you're repeating things frequently, ensuring everyone's actually understood everything accurately. Language is often interpretable, so making sure that everyone has a similar understanding of the outcomes.

[00:26:41] Shruti: I think within Zalando we follow quite a structured process, so I talk about this a little bit in my talk, but we have a well-defined product development process which also has certain stage gates that ensure that we are aligned throughout. So making sure we all agree on the problem, that it is a problem worth solving, that it's a problem that we should be solving and we have the right capabilities and responsibilities to solve, and then of course we have the right solution. So this kind of structured process of alignment, where we all know why we're there in the room and what we're trying to agree, helps to make sure that we're staying aligned and have a similar goal within the team.

Last piece of advice

[00:27:22] Host: Yeah, that's really good. And we'll close now on any last piece of advice that you'd give people out there looking to become a higher performing individual. Shruti, you can start, and we'll continue with everybody.

[00:27:40] Shruti: Higher performing individual. Work smarter, not harder. I think I would say — and this is something I'm trying to practice myself, and it was a great piece of advice given to me a long time ago by a mentor, but it's a process — which is, I think if you are an ambitious, driven person you tend to focus in on the things that are hard for you or challenging for you. You want to fill every gap of every capability and become good at absolutely everything, so your learning goals tend to be all about the things that are hard for you.

[00:28:18] Shruti: But something I suggest humbly is thinking about leaning into the things that you're naturally strong at. What are your strong suits, and how could you amplify those, and how could you apply those in new and different ways within your role? So not always being on the fight or flight mode, but also in the flow mode when you're trying to grow. So try that and let me know if it helps.

[00:28:45] Host: I think so, and I feel it would be positive as well, to stop fighting so much if you focus on your strengths, because it's all learning, in every way. Claire, how about you, what advice would you give to people?

[00:28:57] Claire: I think it would be awareness. I think Shruti also mentioned that as well, that it's just being aware of, firstly, what's out there. You might have these skills that you don't know yet, because you're not aware. And it's about educating yourself as well. I mean, never stop learning. There's always more to learn, and if you feel like you're at a place where, at this point in time, there's no more that you can learn, well, maybe it's time for you to move on.

[00:29:32] Claire: I mean, one of my first bosses ever told me this: if you stop learning, it's time for you to move on. I kind of disagree with him now. It's not necessarily if you stop learning that it's time to move on. I think the time to move on is when you lose the motivation to learn in that specific field or that specific job or that specific role. And just continue teaching yourself every day, whether that's reading an article for an hour every day or watching a video or something. I find the more I know what my colleagues are doing and what their responsibilities are and their deliverables are, the more I figure out how I can help them and help myself to be better at my own job. So I guess just be aware of what's around you and what there is that you could potentially learn.

[00:30:22] Host: That's really nice, yeah, great. And Matti, how about you?

[00:30:28] Matti: Yeah, on the same page that both Claire and Shruti talked about. I think it's great to follow your passion, because that's better than just trying to be in that fight mode. So what you have passion about, try to amplify that. And I think also it's super important to try small, not take that big leap, because if you are ambitious you try to do everything or take on too big of a chunk. I'd say this is going not only for individuals, it's also for teams or organizations: find that local need that you have and try out, try something small, experiment, and then you can scale out.

[00:31:13] Matti: And it comes to how do you work with yourself as well: just take a small step outside your comfort zone, don't take too big of a leap, because the tension will be too big and the pressure will be too big on yourself and the stress will be too big on yourself, and then, yeah, that's not good. So small steps, try out small experiments. And another thing that you talked about, Claire, too, I think this is something very important, that is, if you are in the place that you're feeling it's draining you of energy more than what you get, then that's a signal that you need to do something.

[00:31:54] Host: Yeah, I think that's a really valid point on Claire's behalf: if it's draining, move on. Well, thank you to all of you, really appreciate it, and I hope the audience, you all received a lot of value from that. And please, if you haven't listened to the talks already, please do, they're really fantastic. And we really appreciate your time. I hope to see you all again physically, and I'll hand back over to Jovi [?].