Lead on Purpose

Promoting Leadership Principles in Product Management

Category Archives: Trust


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Leading product strategy and execution

Building software platforms and applications that customers love, and will recommend to their peers, takes extreme focus and hard work. There are many moving parts to product success, including understanding your market and the problems customers in the market face, and building solutions that solve those problems.

Successful product leaders understand the value of both strategy and execution: Strategynecessary for building products that perform well into the future. Execution requires the focus and discipline to do things now for near-term product releases.

How do you succeed in both of these two seemingly dissimilar aspects of product management?

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Patience – A Leadership Principle

During the last few weeks and months so much has changed for all of us. With the recent pandemic we’ve seen many things change that we heretofore took for granted, things we’d become so accustomed to were transformed within days. It’s left us wondering how long it will take to get back to normal or ask whether ‘normal’ will ever be the same. It’s been a trial of endurance to say the least.

My intention is not to cover recent global events, but instead to focus on how we react to what’s happening in our lives; to take a deeper look at ways we can survive hardships and come out stronger as a result.

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Rules for amazing team formation

Guest post by Daniela McVicker

People make companies successful. Without effective team formation, a business can’t succeed. Carefully choosing and assigning roles and tasks is a crucial element in business management.

Building a strong team with a healthy work relationship is a demanding task. That is why carefully selected and strictly established rules can be life savers. These critical rules for team formation can help you create an amazing team.

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Trust Paid Forward

Establishing A Good (and Mutually Beneficial) Business Relationship With Your Employees

From a leader’s point of view, there are three basic things that compose a functional relationship: Command, control, and communication. Those are the most basic aspects that leaders need to establish a basic link between themselves and their employees.

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Image Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-raising-right-hand-1059120/

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Developing high-performance product teams

It’s difficult (if not impossible) to quantify what it takes to develop a productive and successful product team. Every product is unique, and every company does things differently. From a distance it may seem that there’s no process or methodology to create a high-performing product team.

Developing great products entails teams of people working together. With the proliferation of product roles in recent years it has become more important for product teams to function well together and collaborate effectively with other teams and individuals in the organization. Increased focus on building great teams is desperately needed in today’s fast-evolving technology world, yet for too many companies it’s not a high priority.

What does it take to develop a group of disparate individuals into a high-performing product team?

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Building a Culture of Accountability

Guest post by Fred Halstead

 Accountability can be thought of as a punitive word with an implied threat-as in “I’m going to hold you accountable.” Yet, when you think about holding someone accountability, it is actually a measure of your respect for them and the high expectations you have for them.

Throughout the past 38 years, first as an executive search consultant and then as an executive coach, I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of executives. During those years, I began to see what leaders do that leads to accountable cultures. Consistently holding your people accountable is indeed a sign of respect. People who are respected, respond by respecting the person respecting them.

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Leading with love and trust

Leadership can be difficult to understand, to measure and to carry out, and too often the term ‘leader’ is used for someone who manages a group but doesn’t necessarily lead. Furthermore, what constitutes effective leadership differs greatly among cultures, industries and professions.

So how do you know if you are leading effectively?

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4 Steps for Designing a Healthy Interconnective Infrastructure

Guest post by Yvette Bethel

Your interconnective infrastructure is the framework that facilitates interpersonal and other work relationships. It is important to realize that it doesn’t only encompass interpersonal relationships, it also incorporates your communication channels, organizational structure, policies, procedures, and strategy. As a leader, it is important to be able to identify and facilitate your interconnective infrastructure because it is the glue that holds your team together, either facilitating unhealthy cultures or positive ones propelled by authentic, respectful interactions founded on skills that shape and sustain trust.

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Motivating and influencing your teams

You’ve nailed the vision, and built the foundation of trust, now you need to motivate your teams. The success of your product depends on the work they (engineering, UX/design, marketing, sales, etc.) do. In nearly all cases, the individuals on whom you depend for this success do not report to you. That’s why motivating and influencing become some of the most important things you do as a product manager.

What are the key elements to motivating and influencing your teams?

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Building trust with your teams

Another key element of a successful product management organization is creating trust with your teams, the teams you work with to build your products. Creating relationships of trust sets a foundation for the work you and your teams will need to build great products.

Why is building trust so important?

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