Why Working Solo Destroys Your Product Team—and How to Fix It Fast

Avoid becoming divided and conquered with my quick teaming guide.

Imagine you are on a product team. You work alone (solo) most of the time.

You only see your teammates once a day in the daily standup. But you don’t actually talk to your teammates in this meeting. You give an update on your tasks to your team lead.

You also don’t see what happens to your work. When you complete a task, you grab another similar task off the backlog.

This day is like every other day.

Does this seem like the ideal product team working model? Do you think this is an effective way to achieve desired product outcomes sooner? Do you think this builds resilient teams that can react to insights with quick, easy grace?

My answer to these three questions would be no, no, and no.

Yet, this is how the majority of product teams operate today. Individuals work alone on tasks disconnected from their teammates and their users. You don’t have to imagine this scenario. It’s all around us.

I’ve worked on over 100 product teams. Not once have I seen solo work lead to optimal product outcomes.

I’m writing this piece to debunk solo work as an effective product development strategy. And to provide my preferred experienced-based alternative to it.

Are you comfortable in a solo work routine? Do you think it is helping your team work with peak efficiency? Keep reading. You are missing out on the key to great teams…and great products

How did we get to a point where solo work is the accepted default behavior?

I’ve seen three common reasons why solo work is so prevalent.

1: It seems easier. Let’s state the obvious. Working alone on something is easier than collaborating with others on it. Less coordination. Less debate. Less friction.

2: Scale demands it. When we face a large, complex effort, we assume the best move is to task out the work and assign the tasks to specialists. Parallel work looks faster on paper.

3: Remote work embraces it. If everyone on the team is already alone, it seems logical to assign them tasks to work on in isolation. Plus, being remote makes collaboration harder than it already is. So, the easiest option is to work solo.

Both teams and managers embrace solo behavior.

Team members enjoy the immediate freedom from relying on others. They can work in peace from the comfort of their home office, focused on their assigned tasks. It’s great for the introverted among us. Yet, as we will discuss, this isolated work, while at first liberating, comes back to bite them.

Managers love to optimize. They want to squeeze every ounce of effort for the salaries they pay. With solo work, everyone is busy, busy, busy. And this makes managers smile with delight. That is, until it all falls apart in the end.

I’ve triaged many failed product launches, missed deadlines, and burned-out teams. The common culprit? Individuals working alone without a connection to a purpose, value, or team.

Our love affair with solo work brings several wicked side effects along for the ride.

And we often don’t realize we have issues until it’s too late. It’s like we are frogs in a pot of water. We don’t notice the temperature of the water is slowly increasing. Boiling us alive.

Solo work keeps you busy, but it also destroys your team.

The solo worker is often exhausted and ineffective.

Now, I’m sure you are thinking this doesn’t match the liberating calm of staying focused in a flow state. Trust me, I love working alone without having to align with others. But this is not how product development works.

Product development thrives off human interaction and teamwork.

Solo work destroys product teams versus building resilient ones. Individuals become the focus. No interactions. No teamwork.

This wreaks havoc in three primary ways.

1: Decisions suffer. The complexity of product work and the amount of knowledge required is high. It exceeds the capacity of any one individual. Even if you did have all the knowledge to work alone, you miss out on diverse perspectives by working solo.

2: Knowledge cross-pollination plummets. And you can’t learn from your teammates if you don’t work with them. They can’t learn from you, either. I’ve worked with teams where the members didn’t know their teammates’ names. And they had worked on the same team for years.

3: Work piles up when you are not at your best. Let’s not forget the kinship and support a team affords you. Some days you are sharper than others. Your newborn kept you up all night. Your car died, and you have to take it to the shop. You are feeling under the weather. Without a team, you have no backup.

Great products need the best work and support of a team. Working alone doesn’t cut it.

Solo work cuts you off from the very people you’re trying to serve—your users.

When we work solo, we tend to focus on a narrow type of task.

Why? Because we are an expert in our specific skills. It’s what we do well. We are efficient at it. Since the goal is to keep everyone busy, we get a steady stream of similar tasks, fit for our specialization. It becomes the only thing we do.

Our narrow focus becomes a form of blinders.

Before long, we become disconnected with how our task fits into a customer solution. And knowing our user? That’s someone else’s job.

We won’t delight the customer like this. As a solo worker, we don’t know how to.

Our only customer is the person assigning our tasks.

Solo work ultimately kills your outcomes (or at least cripples them).

We already discussed two deadly side effects of solo-work.

1. When you don’t work with your teammates, your quality suffers.
2. When you don’t work with your users, your solutions miss the mark.

But the real killer of outcomes? Waiting.

When all those doing the work don’t work together in the same place at the same time on the same thing, you have waiting. Your teammates are working on disconnected parts of the puzzle. They aren’t available when you need them.

It’s a disconnected, unfocused way of working.

Until all the pieces finish at the end, you can’t try to fit them together. And since software isn’t a slam dunk, you have slim to no chance of getting it right the first time. The result? Tons and tons of expensive rework. And more waiting.

Here is the scenario I see most often:

1. Plan. Solo work assumes perfect upfront knowledge. So we craft the perfect plan and divvy up the work to the right specialists on the team.
2. Off to the Races. Tasks pile up behind the specialists, who work like crazy in isolation.
3. Stalls and Workarounds. The specialists have questions or requests for each other. But they get tired of waiting on answers from their busy teammates. They make assumptions, and move forward with uninformed decisions (guesses). They create faulty workarounds.
4. Judgment Day. When every solo task eventually finishes, the team is out of time and money (and energy). And it has a pile of issues to correct. Yuck.

While this flurry of non-productive activity plays out, users wait and become frustrated. When users finally get a solution (if at all), it isn’t what they need in the time that they need it.

Outcomes don’t land from solo work. They crash.

Turns out, we have a better way. And it immediately strengthens your team and outcome achievement.

My Quick Guide to Working Together As a Team to Achieve Your Best Outcomes

You would think working together requires no explanation.

Yet, here we are.

My guide below is simple, easy to put into practice. And it produces immediate benefits you can both feel and observe.

I know because I’ve seen and experienced the superior results. For instance, one of my teams working like this provided a useful user solution in two weeks.

This is striking when compared to our historical track record. We used to take six months to get any solution to users. And delight would not be a word I would use to describe how our users felt after such a long wait.

My team loved its work again after our return to teamwork. The team bond was strong. I would describe us as unstoppable.

Curious? I know you are. Let’s jump in.

Step 1: Embrace a little discomfort today for less pain tomorrow.

Working with others is more effort than working solo (in the moment).

As mentioned earlier, the ease of working alone is why we often choose to do it. But many things in life that are worthwhile take a bit of extra effort. And collaboration is no different.

It will hurt a little to work together but not nearly as much as the alternative.

• You will avoid waiting for answers from teammates.
• You will avoid painful rework during last-minute integrations.
• You will avoid waiting for your teammates to become available.
• You will avoid being a one-trick pony that only knows one specialty.
• You will avoid having no one to turn to when you aren’t at your best.
• You will avoid wasting effort building things your customer doesn’t need.
• You will avoid making bad decisions that don’t include other perspectives.

A little pain. Big gains.

Step 2: Plan for imperfect knowledge.

Your highest point of ignorance is before you start.

So, planning everything up front and divvying up the work is a foolish move.

I’ve seen well-meaning managers and teams who try to predict the unpredictable. They assign work in neat little queues for specialists to complete. Then, nothing goes as planned and their product outcome is a train wreck. Don’t make this tragic mistake.

Embrace learning instead. Knowledge floods in when you work together with your teammates and your users. The feedback loop is practically immediate. You know when you take a wrong step right after you take it. Then, you can take an informed, better, steadier next step.

Go ahead. Admit you don’t know.

Let go of the upfront detailed plan and individual assignments.

Start collaborating and learning instead.

It will feel good, I promise.

Step 3: Work together at the same time in the same place on the same thing.

This is simple. Start fewer things and work on them together.

Well, allow me to explain what I mean by that.

When you stop spinning many plates, you reduce interruptions and context switching cost. Context switching divides your focus. It wastes time and energy. The result? Delay. Expense. Stress.

When you have less in flight as a team, you can work together better. Time seems to slow down. There are less open questions to answer, decisions to make, tasks to do.

Less context switching and fewer open threads buys you back time. And what can you do with that extra time? Collaborate.

Here’s how I do it. My goal with my team is to take focus to the extreme. We elevate our focus to progress one goal and one feature at a time. At times, we take this further to one task at a time as a team.

This allows us to do our work better. It gives us time to obsess over quality and involve our users along the way.

Even though we are remote, as much as possible, we strive to work together at the same time in the same “place.” We use dedicated collaboration sessions along with Zoom (or Slack if we don’t feel like being on a call).

And sometimes, folks go solo to run down a task for our current focus. We find for some things, solo work makes sense. But we know the dangers of it and treat it with caution. Any time we choose to do solo work, we make sure we come back together as a team often (every few hours) to realign.

The result?

• We earn happy customers and stakeholders.
• We learn from each other and help each other.
• We learn fast and reach desired outcomes sooner.
• We have less stress and fewer misalignment chaos moments.

The best thing? These results appeared as soon as we started working this way.

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Solo work seems like the easy path.

But it’s rarely the right path for product work. It often leads to a painful end, for teams, users, and stakeholders. Solo work doesn’t embrace learning. And learning is central to great teams and useful products.

The right path is one of focused collaboration.

All you need is:

1. To accept a little effort to collaborate now to avoid later pain and chaos.
2. The humility to know you can’t know and assign all the tasks upfront.
3. The discipline to amplify focus to start less and finish it as a team.

This really is not a difficult thing to do. It takes a simple choice to try it. And that simple choice levels up your team, immediately. So, what are you waiting for?

I’ve never seen anything but upside from doing it. Don’t wait for another missed deadline or a failed product launch. Make the shift today and see your team’s results transform overnight.

What will you choose?

To continue in the oblivious comfort of solo work?

Or to start building strong teams and achieving powerful outcomes sooner?

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