Product generalists are holding you back. Here why and how to act

Effective bean-bag time

We’ve all been there. Sitting in a meeting discussing where to shift product and engineering resources given a road map full of commitments. As more things get added rather than subtracted, the pool of talent gets shifted from one project to another at alarming speed.

This leads to several problems.

1. You end up surrounded by generalists who aren’t specialised in a specific product area. Individuals have no time to learn best practices, new ways of doing things or commit to undertaking ‘deep work’. One person focusing on self-service tooling is the next month working on the app homepage.
2. Technical debt gets ignored as resources move onto new things leaving products that require fixes being left to fester.
3. Poor long term planning as resources aren’t thinking more than 3 or 4 sprints ahead. Teams focus on launching a product or set of features knowing they’re unlikely to be around in future to drive continual improvement.
4. Failure to prioritise as resources are seen as being dynamic and available to pivot at short notice from one project to another. Lots of work gets delivered, the only problem is, much of it isn’t very good.

So how do you avoid creating a team of generalists that churn out lots of poor quality work?

Well firstly you rationalise the road map.

You probably already know that you are doing too much. You know those coloured lozenges on the plan are unlikely to be delivered when you said they would be. Sit down with your management team and decide what stays and what goes. You have a pool of talent available yes, but they can’t be spread too thinly. Make some cut decisions.

With less to deliver you can begin to focus your product and engineering resources onto specific themed areas.

You might decide to have someone focusing on the app, another on self-service and another on workforce tooling. Give those individuals clarity on what is expected of them as ‘specialists’. They are there to deliver the product, fix bugs, overcome technical debt and drive continual improvement through learning. Make it clear that while they might need to help elsewhere from time to time, their focus is on their specialist area.

Give them a training budget and license to take time out to develop their knowledge.

Don’t expect great things from your product team if they’re not constantly challenging themselves. Encourage them to attend events such as Productized2018 or WebSummit in Lisbon. Allow them to engage with product communities at other tech companies.

Give them freedom to innovate by syphoning off 10% of their time to work on moon shot projects. Don’t be the leader pushing your team to deliver chat bots when everyone has moved on to something else.

Building a small team of specialists who do deep work within specific product areas will bring dividends. You’ll have a happier product team that is more effective at landing game changing products.

At Strategy Activist we work with clients to improve their effectiveness at delivering products and services to market. To learn more about how we can help visits us at www.strategyactivist.com or call us on +44 7786063053

See you in Lisbon in November :)