The fuel that feeds powerful teams.

Imagine a time when you had a pursuit of your own. How it drove you to be your best and claw your way to greatness. How it made anything not relevant to your goal fade away. How you thought about it 24×7.

Do you have an image in your mind of a time like this?

Was it as part of work? Was it as a member of a product team? The chances of you answering, “Yes,” to either of these questions is slim to zero. If you are one of the lucky few, congratulations.

Most of today’s product teams are not chasing what they would call a pursuit of their own. Others dictate a task-oriented purpose to them. Greatness is not within their control.

• They get solutions to build (recipes), not problems to solve.
• Death march deadlines remove any space for improvement.
• Dependencies limit team control to a small piece of the puzzle.
• They don’t know their customer or even if they have a customer.

I would not want to call this type of work mine. No team would claim this as a pursuit of its own.

A sense of meaningful purpose drives ownership. And ownership drives you to improve and deliver your best work.

• It makes you wake up early, excited about the day.
• It drives you to improve daily so you can upgrade your skills.
• It causes you to put away all distractions so you can focus on it.
• It keeps you working late into the night trying to figure things out.

This is the type of pursuit we all want deep in our bones, but it’s often not our reality on a product team.

Why do product teams not have a pursuit they can call their own?

For some reason, many organizations hire smart people, and then, tell them what to do.

It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, when you join most product teams today, you will become an order taker. A cog in a wheel with no understanding of what the wheel is for or who will use it. You may not even know there’s a wheel.

This misguided approach organizations take is baffling to me. Yet, I’ve seen it my entire career in the software development industry.

And it’s stubborn. I’ve been trying for 20 years to change it.

Most days, I take one step forward and two back as I try to help managers move past methods that suck the life out of teams.

As soon as I take a breather, the old ways seem to claw their way back and take over.

It’s as if every manager of product teams has had training (been brainwashed) in this dated standard. Dramatic? Yes, but often true. I’ve started to assume management doctrine is stuck in time at 1910. This is when Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management.

It’s as if Taylorism has become the de facto way of behaving as a manager.

The popular interpretation of Taylor’s methods focuses on worker specialization. Workers perfect their small part of the job. They follow step-by-step standards given to them. This is a Taylorist tactic of separating workers from thinkers.

Thinkers make the standards. Workers follow the standards.

But managers make a big mistake by applying Taylorism to modern software development. This is knowledge work, not factory work. Teams aren’t a station on a factory line, producing the same product over and over.

Product teams perform creative work. And this requires craft, not procedures.

What do you mean by craft?

Craft is not what you think it is when it comes to product teams.

The idea that craft is a specialized skill is the wrong thinking model. For product teams, craft is both deep and wide. Siloing your knowledge and expertise into a narrow lens of craft doesn’t work in your favor.

Why? Because product teams need to own end-to-end solutions.

Think about it. A team needs to wear many hats to own the emergence of solutions to customer problems.

• They self-manage how they work.
• They own the entire stack of technologies.
• They ensure what they build is of pristine quality.
• They own empathizing with their customers and delighting them.

Product teams can’t settle for being one-dimensional. Otherwise, they won’t have enough control to flow value to their users. They will become a factory station with no connection to value.

I’ve seen teams get stuck by pigeonholing themselves into a narrow specialty.

These teams become a single function. A one-trick pony. They focus only on one step, like the design step, the build step, or the quality assurance step.

Being focused on a small step, a disconnected piece, like this dilutes team purpose. Teams stuck in this model yearn for something greater.

For greatness, a product team must cultivate a landscape of skills.

What do you mean by mastery?

Most of us start every year with renewed vigor.

We have high aspirations of hitting the gym, eating better, and sleeping more. But a few weeks or months into the year, the drive evaporates. We settle back to our old routines and stagnate.

This yearly flameout is but a brief spark that is gone almost as fast as it appears. It’s not what I would call mastery.

Mastery is different from the flash-in-the-pan habits we stop and start every year.

It’s intentional and consistent. It’s a dogged pursuit of perfection, driven by a burning purpose greater than oneself. It draws our attention and compels us to act.

In particular, Toyota is well-known for its tireless focus on continuous improvement. Kaizen, or small improvements that lead to big changes over time, is their version of mastery. They are tireless in their pursuit of what they term, “a moving target of perfection.” Toyota focuses on the chase, not its current state of imperfection.

I can relate to this type of pursuit.

In my personal life, I take pleasure in endless tweaks of my swing arc to produce a searing serve on the tennis court. At work, I’ve spent decades perfecting the art of iterative product experimentation. And as of late, the craft of saying “No” to stakeholder asks is a quest of mine.

To be honest, I sometimes feel like an imposter when first learning a new skill. But the image of future unequaled prowess silences this inner saboteur. Also, taking one step at a time builds safety and confidence.

The journey, even with its ups and downs, brings joy.

My most memorable paths of mastery were with a product team, pursuing it together. There’s something powerful about a team united to master the craft of achieving value.

A team amplifies the joy of the pursuit.

One last point. Mastery self-sustains because the pursuit matters, and it feels good to lead the pack.

It’s a daily practice of showing up and putting in the reps.

You keep going even when no progress happens or when you fall back. It’s as if some invisible magnetism draws you toward it. You think about it when you are in the car, in the shower, or anytime your mind is idle. The draw of inching your way to a purpose worth having is irresistible.

You show up and put in the reps day in and day out, and you gain an unfair advantage over your competition.

Well, I take that back. It’s fair. Anyone can do it. Most don’t.

But you can follow my lead and create an environment where it can flourish for your product team. And you can leave others who don’t in your dust.

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My Six Steps to Unlock the Mastery of Craft in Product Teams

Mastering mastery takes a bit of setup to allow it to flourish.

I’m not claiming to have all the answers to unlock the pursuit of craft in your product team. But I can share what I’ve done to cultivate the right environment for it to happen.

You can take my simple, 6-step guide below, and use it today to jumpstart your pursuit.

Step 1: Reset and reorient to safety.

Let’s face it, your teams are likely not oriented to trust and safety right now.

I know this because it’s what I see in the wild. Most teams today are stuck in the Taylorist factory approach, described earlier. So, we need to explicitly commit to moving away from it. This starts with leadership stating the intent to do so.

Leaders must make this change safe for teams. Teams will be unsteady as they begin to traverse the vast skills of owning product value. These new skills are like undeveloped muscles. Teams must feel leadership support as they train.

Safety allows for mistakes. Mistakes lead to learning. Learning builds craft.

Next, you need to have room to practice your craft.

Step 2: Make space for craft building.

Your teams don’t have time for craft building today.

They are stuck on the line, cranking out widget after widget. It’s like Lucille Ball and the chocolate conveyor belt. You have to slow down the line to make room for mastery of craft. Getting better requires effort and space to do it.

Make craft building a priority. Invest in it.

You have to slow down to speed up.

But having space won’t make a difference if your team is not whole.

Step 3: Form complete, cross-functional teams.

Form the team in a way that puts all the diverse skills and minds together.

One of the biggest problems with factory-line product development is the hand-offs. Each person on the line is a team of one. The only mastery that can happen in this model is for individual tasks.

Instead, put all these folks on a team together, focused on moving value end-to-end as a unit. This way, you have the entire system of work on the team. No hand-offs mean less waiting, rework, and context-switching costs.

And the team members start to learn from each other. They begin to practice the craft of value emergence together. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts when all parts master value attainment in concert.

Your team needs the right people with the right skills to master the craft of value.

But having the right folks on the team won’t matter if the team is hand-cuffed, which leads us to step 4.

Step 4: Dissolve boundaries and expand ownership.

Agency is fragile. Most teams today don’t have it.

When teams are stuck in a factory line, their ownership becomes siloed and narrow. They own a step, a piece of the value.

We want teams to develop a craft for owning value end-to-end. Teams must take ownership. And for teams to take ownership, the entire process must involve the team.

We must remove barriers restricting team ownership.

Instead of having teams at the end, have them work the entire line from concept to cash. When ownership expands, so does the craft development landscape.

To build craft end-to-end, teams must feel ownership end-to-end.

And once ownership emerges, the internal team dynamic must be one of collaboration.

Step 5: Encourage collaboration and knowledge cross-pollination.

Knowledge won’t spread without teamwork.

You need team members working together, not a collection of individuals, working alone. Experts working on their station on the assembly line keeps knowledge siloed. And it reduces team might.

What you need is every team member collaborating on every activity together. This results in diverse, stronger decisions and craft-building across disciplines. You end up with a team of generalizing specialists. They have deep expertise and general know-how by working with their teammates.

Of course, you’ll want to balance collaboration and expertise so you don’t destroy either.

But to make a team powerful and resilient, it must spread its specialized knowledge.

Now you can take craft building up a notch. Inject knowledge from external sources, as described in our final step.

Step 6: Build capability through coaching and mentoring.

The pursuit of craft is like pushing a large rock up a hill.

When you’re on the uphill side, you’re pushing it up, and it’s difficult. When you’re over the hill, you’re on the downslope, and you know what you need to do.

Having a coach and a mentor helps ease the uphill part of the journey.

Who does this?

• Managers
• Peers
• Other teams
• External experts

Teams learn better from those who have taken the journey before.

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That’s it.

A product team’s need for craft is expansive.

You don’t want narrow specialists. You don’t want hand-offs. You don’t want reliance on others to take work from concept-to-cash. You don’t want to rely on good luck.

Instead, you want teams to perfect end-to-end skills and be able to depend on them. And that comes with practice and mastery of craft.

Most rebuttals to focusing on craft building center around the time investment. But craft building pays along the journey, not at the end. The cool thing about the path to mastery is that every day you get better. And that means you can put your investment to use right away.

What skill will your team start practicing today? What benefits will you see?

There’s nothing like having a pursuit of your own. Good luck with yours.

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