As you progress on the journey of building great teams, you create the vision, build a strong foundation of trust and motivate your team to reach beyond what they thought they were capable of doing. The next step is to work with your teams to develop their ability to work more effectively and hone their skills for the markets your products serve.

Why should you focus on developing your team?

As the product manager, you are the heart of the product team. You are responsible for knowing the market and gathering the data necessary for making key decisions for which products you build and how you take them to market.

To do this effectively, you need to help the people you work with—who are usually on other teams—build knowledge and skills to work effectively and efficiently. You need build them up, and help them build themselves, to release the innovative products that your customers will love, your markets will embrace, and the external potential customers will recognize as potentially solving their problems.

With the foundation in place, you can develop your teams’ abilities by taking the following actions:

• Provide insights and direction: You are the market authority for your company, you know things about the customers and the competitors no one else knows—share that information with your team and convey this key data in a way that will influence them to do their best work.
• Build structure around the work the team is doing: Too much process can reduce your productivity; however, expanding the right processes in the right way can improve your teams’ efficiency. Look for ways you can build the appropriate structure around your work.
• Share research and information about the market and industry: The information you have gained from the outside is fuel for the engineers and others who are working on your products. Spend the time sharing this information, formally and informally, with your teams. You can empower and encourage them in ways you didn’t expect.

Every team member you work with wants to become more productive. Your influence and efforts to build them and help them grow will lead to greater growth and profitability for your company.

Questions: Who can you benefit by building their skills? What information have you shared with your team lately? Please leave a comment in the space below.

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The Product Management Perspective: Building your team members skills and abilities is the fourth of five key factors of a methodology I have developed to create successful product teams. Watch for the final factor in an upcoming article on Lead on Purpose.