TEI 317: Culture, teams, and leadership – with Teresa Jurgens-Kowal, PhD

The secret sauce product managers need for success This podcast is getting a new name to better align with its purpose of helping product managers become product masters. That new name is Product Masters Now. You don’t need to do anything to keep listening, but I want you to know the name change is coming in a few weeks, and it will show up in your podcast player not as The Everyday Innovator™ but as Product Masters Now. This is another episode in the series on a product management body of knowledge curated by the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). If you are unfamiliar with PDMA, it is the longest running volunteer-led professional association for product managers, existing since 1976. I’ve been publishing this series every-other-week, starting with episode 307, which was an introduction to the body of knowledge. Today we cover topics related to culture, teams, and leadership, which are essential to forming and maintaining an innovative environment that enables, encourages, and rewards product management and innovation processes and practices. Our guest is Dr. Teresa Jurgens-Kowal, founder of Global NP Solutions, which helps individuals and organizations learn, adopt, transform, and sustain innovation. Previously, she worked in R&D, process technology development, and as an internal innovation expert at ExxonMobil Chemical Company. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [3:12] How are Culture, Teams, and Leadership important to product innovation? It’s easy to implement systems, templates, and checklists, but culture, teams, and leadership really make for success. Teams need collaboration, expertise, and autonomy. You need trust among your teams and effective leadership that bridges the gap between strategy and execution. [4:45] What is culture and how does it impact organizations and product teams? You can feel the culture when you enter an organization—an innovative culture or a hindering, bureaucratic culture. The culture teaches how we do things in an organization. It’s how people behave and accomplish the mission. Culture allows a company to understand important qualities such as their risk tolerance, how much they can trust their teams, how much they interact with customers, how they work together, the pace of work, and how they bring an idea to commercialization when there’s risk involved. Culture is the “secret sauce” to unlocking success. [9:20] How does culture relate to strategy? Strategy consists of vision, mission, and values. Vision is who we are as an organization and includes our long-term goals for interactions with our community, employees, and environment. Mission is how we accomplish the vision. Values are the driving behaviors. Culture is closely tied to values because culture includes behaviors that allow an organization to have a reasonable approach to risk, fulfill their mission, and meet their vision. [13:19] What is the importance of teams to innovation? Lone geniuses don’t create spectacular innovations. For innovation, we need teams, particularly cross-functional teams that start together, work together, and launch the product together. Cross-functional teams can take many forms: * Functional work groups for depth of innovation * Lightweight teams for minor tweaks * Heavyweight teams for large innovations * Autonomous teams for something brand new Important elements of a successful innovation team include: * Trust * Autonomy * Ability to learn from mistakes and not be punished for them * Being close to customers [19:31] How do work styles impacts teammates and team performance? The Z model identifies four categories of preferred work styles: * Creators like to come up with ideas.