Building Happy Product Teams

What makes a happy product team, and how close can teams come to the heist crews in films like Ocean’s 11 or The Italian Job? In this talk from Mind the Product 2016, Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups, shares findings from her research into people’s favourite teams.

Great heist teams have a clear, challenging goal, and Laura found that a hard but reachable goal tends to bond a team. Heist crews are experts who respect one another, and 80% of her participants cited expertise, respect and trust as key to their favourite teams. Happy teams balance time together and apart: they align in person, work separately and check in daily. And they use incentives that reward collaboration rather than individual performance.

Some things make teams harder: remote working (fully remote teams, spreading skills across locations and regular face-to-face time help), external stakeholders who appear late and derail projects, and siloed departments. Laura’s research found no correlation between happy teams and product success, but happy teams were more resilient, more open to feedback and more likely to stay together.