by Janus Boye
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
As a product leader, how do you change the culture of a group of engineers to be more customer-centric?
Lauren St. Jean is Senior Product Manager at German neobank N26 in Berlin and recently hosted a member conference call, where she shared her experiences trying to change how backend teams think.
A little over a year ago, Lauren started working with a backend platform engineering group composed of component teams. Talking to them about a customer mindset and beginning to think of their area of responsibilities more holistically and focused on customer problems rather than just improving performance, was greeted with less than optimistic enthusiasm from many engineers.
Product goal versus product reality
Similar to many product leaders in our community, Lauren opened the talk by pointing to an important gap when it comes to product goal compared to reality.
She listed these goals which resonated with many in the call:
Consistent
Compliant
Easy to use
Secure
The product reality though was a bit different as Lauren pointed out:
Confusing
Many pieces
Dependant on technical knowledge
Sounds familiar? Her last year has been trying to change the mindset of the backend engineers by shifting focus from improving tech stacks to solving problems.
Teams are rarely broken
The key to successful change according to Lauren is leadership and she mentioned trust as the first key ingredient. She then moved onto basic practices and talked about how behaviours become habits and habits in turn become culture.
Lauren treats teams as complex dynamic systems and in her view, teams are never (or rarely) broken. She has worked hard on trying to avoid having too much work in progress, implemented agile principles, extensive roadmapping and workshops. She’s also worked to empower the engineers with more decision making authority, a clearer vision and less silo thinking.
The result has been improved quality of work, predictability, and also how the engineers feel about the value of their work.
What’s on the roadmap for the product manager?
Just like products are never really done, product managers also continue to have room for improvement. Lauren highlighted these four areas as her focus at the moment:
Improving estimations
Getting better at prioritization
Cross team planning
Better department communication and understanding goals of other departments
Learn more about product leadership
Lauren has kindly shared her slides from the talk and you can download them here (PDF). We regularly host member calls and you can also join one of our product management peer groups in Europe or North America.
If you are not a part of our community, why not become a member?
You can also lean back and enjoy the entire 26-minute recording below.