Motivating Your Team As A Individual Contributor Product Manager

Insights for Product Managers on How to Motivate in Diverse Cultures.

As a Product Leader, I've observed diverse product cultures shaped by executive leadership and cascading down to teams. Each company I worked at had its fluctuations, directly impacting team motivation.

At Littlepay and TIER in their early stages, motivation was high; everyone was eager to innovate and provide value to customers. However, during the economic downturn at TIER Mobility from 2022 to 2023, profitability took precedence. Over 18 months, successive layoffs led to a decline in motivation, and plummeting employee NPS.

There are many reasons why fostering motivation can be challenging amidst varying product cultures:

1. Leadership Style and Company Goals: The leadership style and overarching company goals heavily shape the product culture. In environments where profit margins and short-term gains are prioritized, such as during economic downturns, the focus may shift towards cost-cutting and efficiency rather than innovation and employee satisfaction.

2. Organizational Structures and Decision-making Processes: Organizational structures and decision-making processes play a significant role. In hierarchical setups, where autonomy and creativity are stifled, team members might feel disengaged and undervalued.

3. Transparency and Communication: The level of transparency and communication within a company greatly impacts motivation. When there's a lack of clarity regarding objectives, progress, and individual contributions, employees can feel disconnected and demotivated.

Motivating teams in the realm of product development is a crucial yet intricate task, often influenced by the prevailing product culture within an organization.

Let’s take a look at two real PMs that I’ve worked with previously, anonymised for the sake of this post :)

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The Tale of Two PMs

Amy works as a Product Manager in a SaaS Business, where:

• she is responsible for a small product feature set that is not performing well financially

• she has clear objectives, KPIs, and problem areas for her to discover

• she is responsible for a roadmap that is prioritised by her, trusted by her leader to do so via data and evidence she has collected with her stakeholders

• she has the tools and organisational structure (say, a dedicated squad or team) to deliver against her domains and goals

• however her company is not profitable today, and while the leadership has a plan of becoming profitable, it is constantly behind revenue numbers and always asks Amy for demonstrated impact in her deliverables.

Here, Amy my works in an “Empowered Product Team”, but suffers high mental load from executives asking about her initiatives every week.

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

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John, on the other hand, works in a completely different cultural environment than Amy, although still a SaaS business, where:

• The company is profitable and his product areas are growing revenue slowly over time, around 5% per year

• He is responsible for the backend team: a team of backend engineers that own components in a large processing platform

• Feature requests are handed to him either by escalation or service desk. Each feature request has due dates, seeking prioritisation from sales teams, customer success, or from escalations from executives

• Often these requests demanded by current paying customers, where if feature requests were not delivered, they threaten to churn

• Discovery and ideation of different solutions to solve the underlying problems does not occur: there’s no time to do this, due to the endless stream of feature requests

• His roadmap is full of features, where the final outcome or impact is not that clear: it looks like a wish list of functionality, driven by a sales-led organisation

Here, John works in a “Feature Factory”, where teams focus primarily on churning out product features without considering broader strategic goals or user needs.

Photo by Alexander Tsang on Unsplash

As Melissa Perri puts it:

The build trap is when organizations become stuck measuring their success by outputs rather than outcomes.

It’s when they focus more on shipping and developing features rather than on the actual value those things produce.”

― Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

Which would you rather be: Amy or John?

From the above situations, you probably have a strong preference for one over the other:

• Many PMs I would ask would love to be in the Empowered Team: given the autonomy to shape and deliver value to customers in the way they want, despite the lack of clarity on the future to come. In short, these people enjoy uncertainty because of the support they have around them to figure it out autonomously.

• However, there are many PMs or POs who don’t mind working in Feature Factories, because work is well defined and they have other priorities in their life to focus on: perhaps a family, or even a side hustle.

For PMs that haven’t been able to find their fully Empowered Product team to work in, they have a choice to either:

• Lead by example as a change leader towards a better way of working to inspire and motivate the peers and stakeholders around you; or

• Accept the status quo, not questioning nor improving culture, as its considered too much a heavy lift.

I argue, in most cases, you should definitely try to improve your ways of working. If you don’t, your mental health may suffer faster than you realise!

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Accepting Status Quo Doomed For Failure

Regardless of the heavy lift, you always want to attempt to improve culture, for three main reasons: