Uncover the predictive indicator of peak performance.
Metrics, measurement, and return on investment. I don’t go much more than a day without running into this common theme. It’s a persistent thread on everyone’s mind.
“We must track the on-time delivery track record of our teams.”
“We need to assess if we have produced something of value to our customer.”
“How do we know if we are making an impact on our business for the effort we put in?”
Output, outcome, and impact are certainly important indicators of our success. And we have many ways to measure how we are doing along these dimensions. They seem on the surface like the logical thing to inspect.
But these are all downstream or lagging indicators. They come too late to make a difference in the final result. Instead, we need a predictive indicator of our future success—a leading indicator.
This article provides what I have found to be the best predictor of product team success. I must admit, I did not expect this ultimate indicator when I started working with product teams.
This year, I’ve committed my focus to a concept called lean leverage, as described in my inaugural 2024 post. Each article I craft this year, starting with this one, will focus on an aspect of lean leverage. So, let’s dive in to the lean leverage approach to measuring what matters in your product team.
Why I don’t recommend focusing solely on output, outcome, and impact measures
As I mentioned, output, outcome, and impact are lagging indicators. While important, I have not seen them to be timely enough to influence peak success. We need something more fundamental and predictive.
It’s a new year, so let’s use a common New Year’s resolution as an analogy: getting healthy to promote longevity. I may measure output by time spent in the gym, how many calories I am eating, or how many hours I am sleeping. Possible outcomes would be reduced blood pressure, cholesterol, and body fat percentage. My desired impact would be longer healthspan (healthy years, no disease) and lifespan.
While these aspects of achieving longevity are great indicators, they arrive late. The information is not timely enough to help me adjust my path to ensure optimal longevity. I need something more fundamental to ensure I am on the right path as I pursue my goal.
This means I need to ensure I am:
- Doing the right dosage of exercise and the right types of exercise.
- Eating the correct mix of macronutrients at the right time.
- Creating the optimal conditions for restful, deep sleep and REM sleep.
These behaviors are crucial for getting the longevity results I desire. Much research and evidence exists on the optimal mix of exercise, diet, and sleep for peak results.
If I’m not using the established patterns, I don’t need to spend effort to measure output, outcomes, and impact. I already know they will be poor if I don’t follow the well-known habits for success. Garbage in, garbage out.
This is the same with product teams. Output, outcomes, and impacts will be low if the fundamentals behaviors are not in place. In the absence of leading, predictive behaviors, don’t bother measuring lagging indicators.
But what are the foundational behaviors that matter for product teams?
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The foundational predictors of product team success
The foundations of product team success are well established but, often, aren’t practiced. In my experience, I have found the six behaviors below to be predictive of a winning product team.
1. Learning. A learning forward team is characterized by frequent, fast, inexpensive learning loops. The team has direct engagement with customers and stakeholders and understands their needs. A focus on learning relies on a humble approach to product management. Here you accept that you “don’t know” the right thing to build or how to build it right before you start the work. Instead, you rely on experimentation and ground-truth evidence to chart the optimal path.
2: Improvement. A continuous focus on improvement means never being satisfied with current conditions. This mindset ensures teams don’t stagnate. They know if they don’t change to meet new situations, their competition is and will pass them by. These teams make space to continuously pursue a moving target of perfection.
3: Atomic Focus. Small teams focused on finishing what they start will outperform big, unfocused teams. Having atomic focus is small but powerful. These teams hone in on one user need at a time and iterate to the simple, right solution sooner with quality.
4: Teamwork. Teams of specialists working solo are efficient but ineffective. When these specialists instead work as a team to deliver value, they win. Teamwork has the multiplier effect of many minds and drives collective ownership. Team members that work together are stronger.
5: Engagement. Witnessing a team fueled by high levels of autonomy, mastery, and purpose is a beautiful thing. Engaged teams have all that is needed to deliver customer solutions from concept to cash. When engagement is high, you can dependably predict higher and sustainable effectiveness.
6: Safety. When a team is safe, it readily raises problems, asks for help, and takes action without fear. Transparency and swift action follows safety. A safe to fail environment is a core enabler of learning, improvement, and innovation.
These six behaviors are proven, effective pre-conditions for peak output, outcomes, and impact.
But when these are not present, poor output, outcome, and impact will follow, guaranteed. I find no need to measure the lagging indicators when the fundamentals are missing.
To illustrate, imagine you have a world-class runner. You put weights on her ankles, a blindfold over her eyes, and put obstacles in her path. She does not have time to practice and improve her stride, and she is required to run two races at the same time. Do you need to measure her race time to know it sucks? No, you don’t.
Fortunately, the fundamentals for product teams are common sense. But I am sure you will agree with me that these are rarely fully present in most product teams. Given they are so logical, you may wonder why are they not in common practice.
This brings us to the real indicator of success potential for a product team. In my experience, even the foundational behaviors have a predictive pre-condition. This pre-requisite will thwart if absent or propel if present the practice of foundational behaviors.
The ultimate leading indicator of product team success
One predictive measure beats all others when it comes to ensuring the success of a product team. You might think it is the skill or experience of the team members. Or you could assume the market demand potential for its product drives success. These are of value, but they are not what I have found to be a critical, key enabler for the foundations to flourish.
The ultimate leading indicator of product team success is an engaged, enabling leader.
I’m not saying the leader makes the team. But the leader creates the environment that enables team fundamentals to take root. And the fundamentals propel teams to successful output, outcomes, and impact.
An enabling leader has several key behaviors that carve a path for the foundations to take root:
- They create the conditions for optimal team formation. An enabling leader will put the right conditions in place for optimal team formation. This includes ensuring all capabilities are on the team for concept-to-cash delivery. An enabling leader makes space for the team to self-select and co-create its shape as much as possible.
- They create a safe space for learning. An enabling leader encourages experimentation as the way to reduce risk. They understand knowledge is power and that it comes by taking a step and learning. Wrong steps get celebrated for the learning gained. These leaders accept not knowing the right path to take up front.
- They create conditions to grow team autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Enabling leaders build engaged teams by connecting them directly to customers and stakeholders. They help the team grow in capability and break dependencies. An enabling leader pushes decisions to the team. They give the team space to iterate their solution and improve the way they work. And most of all, these leaders partner with the team to co-create a meaningful purpose.
- They remove obstacles the team cannot remove itself. An effective enabling leader improves the system in which the team has to work. This may mean collapsing silos, removing over-processing, killing fake deadlines, or dissolving proxies. The opportunity to remove system waste is often large, and the enabling leader takes this on for the team.
When leaders don’t do these things, teams become crippled. The foundational behaviors don’t get practiced and can’t materialize as habits. The teams get stuck in a system that simply can’t succeed.
The ultimate leading indicator of product team success is an engaged, enabling leader.
Basically, enabling leadership is the leading indicator of the foundational leading indicators. When you have enabling leadership, everything else falls into place. Measure this one thing to assess your lean leverage potential.
Taking it forward
Successful product teams have effective delivery of output. Their customers love what they build. And they achieve the desired business impact.
But you should not expect this result if teams don’t have fundamental behaviors that enable them. And you should not expect the fundamentals to be in place if you don’t have enabling leadership.
Sure, you could measure any number of indicators to track success. But the simple measurement that matters most is the degree of enabling leadership.
Enabling leadership clears the path for the fundamentals. And it’s the best predictive indicator of your optimal output, outcomes, and impact.
First, enabling leadership. Then, fundamental behaviors. The results you desire will follow.
This is lean leverage in action, measuring what matters.
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Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.
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