3 Reasons Why Your Product Team is Faltering (and what you can do about it)

If your product team is getting off course time and time again, or has failed to make progress for many months, it may be time to run some diagnostics and address the root cause. There are a lot of reasons why derailment happens, but in my experience most can be traced back to one or more things missing in the context of their work. 

1. Lack of clear priorities  

   Sometimes, executive leadership fails to communicate the priorities from the top, either because they haven’t set them or they haven’t articulated them in a way that teams can activate against. When this happens, it puts pressure on the Product Manager to interpret or extrapolate (as an intermediary step). If this is the case, start by defining metrics for your team’s work with your best guess as to how it contributes to the org, while also pushing your leaders for more clarity around priorities. 

   In other cases, it may be that the product team isn’t seeing how their work translates or ladders up to the objectives and priorities of the org. Sometimes this shows up as a random collection of meaningless initiatives trying desperately to look like a backlog and roadmap. Other times, it means that you can’t articulate why you’re working on what you’re working on, but you know that you should. It might be time to go back and check your work. Identify the org’s goals, KPIs and outcomes, then spell out how the product objectives, roadmap items and backlog items connect back to the company objectives. Get the team involved in this work to ensure shared understanding. 

2. Lack of role clarity

   Symptoms here include noticing that you’re stacked with meetings but nothing ever gets done, it’s unclear who should own the work, or there’s confusion around where one person’s job ends and another's begins. In this situation, I recommend doing a role-clarity exercise with the whole team to outline each person’s job so it’s clear who’s responsible for what. Get specific. Maybe even try running through some test cases as a team to make sure everyone agrees on roles and collaboration points. 

3. Lack of understanding or commitment to stakeholder needs and expectations

   Sometimes product teams go rogue. They think stakeholders are holding them back, or that they’ll just catch them up at a later date rather than bringing them along for the ride. It should be no surprise then when the stakeholders react poorly and a power struggle ensues. This is a major no-no and I’d caution any product team against it because the value of the product isn’t just tied to the value to the customer, it’s also tied to the business value. If you need help figuring out the best way to communicate with your stakeholders, check out my recent post about streamlining emails and meetings with your constituents. 

   Conversely, if stakeholders aren’t showing up for meetings or aren’t responding to the product team’s emails, that’s a big, bottleneck-shaped problem. I usually like to assume positive intent – that they’re not ignoring the team to be mean – but maybe they aren’t the best stakeholders for the project, or perhaps it’s a prioritization issue wherein they don’t understand how their lack of response impacts the work. Either way, the issue probably needs to be escalated and addressed. 

If none of these diagnoses align with your team’s symptoms, it could be that the product team is missing a major moment for collaboration (more on that here), or that you need a specialist to take a look under the hood (which I’m happy to do if you send me a note).