3 Ways Leaders Can Cultivate a Learning Culture and Build Insanely Curious Product Teams

You have to remove what’s in the way.

Curious teams eclipse teams who simply do what they’re told.

As a manager of product teams, you have to create the right environment for learning. When you manage, many of the traditional actions you perform get in the way of team curiosity. But if you shift to leadership, you can remove the barriers to team learning potential.

By the time you finish this post, you will have three practical methods to amplify team curiosity.

Why is this an advantage? It’s simple: these teams can leverage learning to deliver the right product, in the right way, at the right time.

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, including this one, will focus on an aspect of lean leverage. Enjoy and stay tuned for many ways to do more with less.

3 ways leaders can cultivate a learning culture.

I have partnered with managers in over twenty companies to shift to a leadership stance. And I have personal experience as a manager struggling through this transition. With every management team I consult today, I use and evolve the patterns we are about to review. You can take them and apply them to your context.

Now, let’s get to the three ways you can set free pent-up product team curiosity.

Way №1 — Stop locking in deadlines and scope up front.

The quickest way to shut down curiosity is to hand a recipe to your team with a deadline (as a motivator for urgency).

Lock-tight scope and deadlines constrict all available space for experimentation, learning, and innovation. This drives the team to cut corners when the unexpected inevitably arrives. And what gets cut is typically quality.

So, not only does a team have no time to try new things, it doesn’t have time to deliver the scope set in stone up front.

Don’t assume emergence is rare in product development; it’s rampant and unavoidable.

The better approach is to co-create a clear, small, near-term goal and leave the scope flexible. Give the team space to try simple solutions to the problem and get feedback from customers. The feedback will help the team iterate to the right product with no excess adornments. Having no deadline will ensure it evolves with high-quality standards in place. And high customer involvement will provide focus and momentum.

Removing deadlines and rigid scope opens the door for curious teams to run through.

Way №2 — Remove the most destructive barrier to trying new things: a lack of safety.

Having no safety kills a team’s curiosity.

Sure, you could argue the team should have courage. But let’s be honest, this is rare.

Courage always loses to career progression.

The safety to experiment goes up and down based on the tone you set as a leader when things go south. We don’t like to talk about failure, but it is common in the complex, uncertain world of product development. If you seek blame when a team fails, learning dies. And team courage to try new, unproven things evaporates.

One thing you must do when things go into the “red” zone: fight the urge to tell the team to plan better and not take risks.

So, when things don’t go as planned, leaders should instead celebrate the learning.

When a failed action is considered a win, it propels the team to continue deciding and trying things on their own. Teams without fear will innovate better products. They will formulate better ways of working. And they will have no fear of testing their assumptions. I have seen no better path to team autonomy than safety.

Leaders, embrace the “red” — that explosion in the lab is the sound of learning by curious minds.

Way №3 — Eliminate any proxy between the team and its customers and stakeholders.

Teams turn off their curiosity when they are not engaging with the product community.

If someone stands between teams and their stakeholders and users, teams lose purpose. The purpose becomes doing what the proxy tells them to do. They have no chance to deeply understand customer needs and can’t assess if what they build hits the mark.

Teams without customer connection, lack autonomy, reduce innovation, and draw inside the lines.

By connecting teams directly with customers, team purpose increases exponentially.

Teams will start to deeply know their customer and what needs they have. They will understand if the solutions they build give the customers what they need in the time it is needed. This generates a flywheel for teams to try novel approaches to solve customer needs.

Most of all, this connection drives high team engagement (autonomy, mastery, and purpose). You won’t find a more predictive indicator of future team effectiveness.

As a manager, remember this one thing.

To fully transition from manager to leader, you have to let go.

You have to release control and give the team room to take ownership. When you are managing, you might find that you are what is in the way of your team taking flight. So, get out of the way.

Trust me, I learned this the hard way from my experience as a manager.

Many years ago, I learned this lesson by trying to solve all my team’s problems myself. Don’t repeat my mistake. I intended to make my team’s life easier by removing the burden of the team having to figure things out on its own. But the result was my team was disengaged and unfulfilled.

Happiness is in the pursuit, so let go; allow your teams to chase the answer.

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You can read related posts I’ve written similar to this one below:

How to optimize product team success: measure what matters

We Need Managers to Become Agile Leaders

Embracing Change Requires You to Let Go