Many enterprise organizations are implementing a product model to enhance their overall agility, customer satisfaction, and team health.

In the product model, we often talk about the empowerment of product teams. The members of a product team have the autonomy to design, build, test, and deploy their product. They have the responsibility to gather customer feedback and strategic insight, then use that to make their product better.

Empowered, self-organizing product teams are great. Everyone, regardless of title, is leading to ensure success. They can seem almost completely self-sufficient. There’s a lot of leadership going on right inside the product team.

Organizationally, product team members report to a manager, a portfolio leader, or a center of excellence leader. These leaders play an important leadership role to their direct reports and ensure the success of the entire product model.

Here are some key focus areas for these leaders:

Support the product teams: Product teams need help. Sometimes, they need more resources, new talent, better vendor partnerships, more funding, or better tooling. Leaders listen and act to support their product teams.

Defend the product teams: It takes a lot of discipline to stay agile. Product teams often face external pressures to behave in traditional waterfall ways. Product teams need the support of their leadership to protect their way of working.

Inspire the product teams: Product teams are well-aware of what they are working on, why it’s important, and what’s next. However, they don’t often see the future. Leaders need to continually refine and communicate the long-term vision.

Connect the product teams: As much as we love autonomy, our product teams do not exist in isolation. Together, they form an interconnected fabric of digital business capability. Leaders navigate and manage interdependencies, so they are aligned in harmony, not in conflict.

If you work on a product team, you have tremendous leadership responsibility. Your boss isn’t going to tell you what to do or how to do it. In collaboration with your teammates, you figure that out.

If you lead a set of product teams or a center of excellence, know that you have a responsibility to support, defend, inspire, and connect.

I hope this advice helps you on your product journey. How’s it going on your team? Let me know in the comments.

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