As an experienced product leader, you already understand the importance of investing in your team’s growth and development.
The challenge lies in finding practical ways to apply these principles amidst the demands of a busy schedule. In the time-management article, we helped you create more space.
Now we’ll explore smart, actionable strategies to ensure consistent growth and development in your product team. Use these strategies as inspiration, or blatantly copy them. Hopefully you will implement some of these and reap the benefits. Let’s dive in:
1. All Leaders are Readers.
Most effective way to prioritise growth: Establish dedicated time slots for self-improvement for your whole team. Expect to see people with their noses buried in books, working in Udemy, watching instructional videos or anything like that.
Block off regular hours in the calendar, just like you did for yourself based on the confirmation page (right? Otherwise do it now). Protect the hours from interruptions. Use them to invest in personal and professional development.
For maximum efficiency, there are two extra rules:
- Show, don’t tell. Join the session yourself to set an example. By participating alongside your team, demonstrate your commitment to continuous growth.
- Help your people to set goals for these sessions in your regular 1-on-1’s.
Final tip:
It works really well to share insights with each other in the last 3-5 minutes of the blocked hour. This way you both remember what you learned better and you share the knowledge across the team.
2. Implement Growth Sprints
If setting aside weekly blocks doesn’t work for you, you could also introduce short, focused “growth sprints” into your team’s workflow. This is where teams can work on a specific skill or competency. These sprints can last anywhere from a day to about a week. Ideally, you should do this with your PMs, the developers and your designers.
If you want to do a full sprint you could decide on a set timebox that is reserved for the growth subject per day and the rest is business as usual. This allows your team to deep-dive into targeted growth areas. You’ll be surprised how many innovations will come from this.
3. Promote mentorship and peer coaching
Pair up your PMs for mentorship or peer coaching sessions. Encourage them to share their experiences, challenges and best practices, fostering cross-pollination of ideas and insights. These relationships can lead to long-term growth by providing valuable feedback, support, and guidance. And while you can always facilitate this internally, this is as good a place as any to run a little commercial break: Group Effort also offers select peer groups for PMs! The benefit of this setup is that the sessions are moderated and your PMs are also exposed to outside perspectives.
4. Utilize “Lunch and Learn” sessions
Organize regular “Lunch and Learn” sessions, where your team can come together to discuss a specific topic or explore new ideas.
Invite guest speakers or encourage team members to present on relevant subjects, fostering a culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing.
This set-up is very suited to teaming up with the tech teams, and if you have a good scrum master or agile coach around maybe you can borrow them to set this up as a combined effort, therefore also improving the team relations.
5. Integrate growth into 1-on-1s
Incorporate personal and professional growth goals into your team’s growth. You could use your 1-on-1s to also set expectations for development progress and hold your PMs accountable for their growth. It can be very useful if you help them set goals you think will help them improve while also listening to their personal needs. It should be a combined effort.
This will encourage them to prioritize self-improvement and align their growth with company goals.
Conclusion
Summarizing: To get to continuous growth you will need to invest. Select how you will work on this and understand that sometimes in order to speed up, you need to slow down.
You got ideas to: Dedicate time for self-improvement, implement growth sprints, promote mentorship, and integrating growth into performance reviews.
Use these to unlock your team’s full potential and invest in long-term success.
Remember: Your dedication to growth and development will inspire your team to strive for excellence in all aspects of their work.
Good luck with applying!
