If you've ever worked with other people, you are likely familiar with team dynamics. Though they'll definitely vary from group to group, as a product manager, there are a few key dynamics that'll appear regardless of who you team is. One important dynamic is your role as a leader among your team. As the point person for your project, your engineers will look to you for guidance and updates from your client. Your job is to lead them in the right direction and make sure they have all the information and resources they need to build an amazing (and useful!) product. At times this'll be difficult, especially if you're younger than some of your team members or have less technical experience, but always remember that it's a two-way street. One of the best ways to earn the respect of your team is to understand your limitations and be able to defer to them for guidance on topics you're less familiar with. Establish yourself as the decision-maker, but always be open to suggestions from your engineers and convey to them that you value and respect their input.

Another important team dynamic that you'll come across during your time as a product manager is the relationship between your engineers. Oftentimes, a de facto "(technical) team lead" role will emerge, but this isn't always the case. Regardless, you should help foster strong connections between your engineers so people feel more comfortable collaborating, debating, and sharing ideas. A good strategy for starting off on the right foot is to establish team norms during your first meeting. This'll keep everyone on the same page when it comes to interacting with each other, contributing their fair share, staying organized, etc. Once you've established your team norms, you'll want to continue enforcing them for the duration of the project (usually a gentle reminder will do). Watch out for signs of tension, disengagement, or reluctance among your engineers. These could indicate deeper seeded issues: anything from a lack of trust to feelings of exclusion to fear of retaliation or failure. All of these inhibit progress and damage people's project experiences, so you should address any issues as soon as possible. Depending on the situation, this may look like one-on-one conversations with each engineer to gauge their feelings in a lower stakes environment or a full team meeting where you discuss issues people have noticed and brainstorm potential solutions. What you choose to do will depend on the nature of the problem, but it is your responsibility to keep morale high and push the project forward.

Exercise

Consider a team that you've worked on and did not enjoy or did not accomplish what you had hoped.

  1. What issues did you face personally? How did they impact the outcome of the project and your feelings toward the team?
  2. Is there anything that exacerbated the issues?
  3. Why do you think the issues appeared in the first place? What circumstances or events allowed these problems to occur?
  4. What do you wish a team lead could have done to intervene?