The five dysfunctions of a product manager

Andy Hughes, a product and organisational agility consultant, shares strategies to navigate common pitfalls within the domain of digital product management.

April 26, 2024

4 min read

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Andy Hughes

Andy is an SPCT at PA Consulting. He is an experienced product and organisational agility consultant. He works with organisations to help them amplify ‘agility’, maximise 'flow', and increase 'value'. He specialises in building alignment across organisations, agile product lifecycles and large-scale agile transformation. Andy's approach to is grounded in real-world experiences, focused on the human aspects of agility. He leverages his SAFe Practice Consultant-T (SPCT) and a Government Digital Services (GDS) assessor certifications to help organisations shape their delivery organisations to maximise customer value and actively manage product lifecycles from a customer value perspective. He works across a variety of sectors with a particular focus on including Healthcare, Government, Defence & Security, Financial Services, and Consumer & Manufacturing. His Agile journey began in 1999 as a developer working with Extreme Programming (XP), and over the following decades he went on to specialise in "human centred transformation" and "organisational agility coaching", working with many teams and leading several global transformations in both IT and non-IT contexts. He has trained/certified over 1,000 people, and regular speaks at events about product management, ways-of-working, agility and transformation.

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Patrick Lencioni's influential work, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," serves as a valuable perspective for examining the intricacies of team dynamics and the associated challenges. This article builds on Lencioni's framework to provide guidance specifically tailored to digital product managers (DPMs). This guidance equips digital product managers with strategies to navigate common pitfalls within the domain of digital product management.
Lencioni's framework outlines five fundamental dysfunctions that teams may encounter: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. In the following summary, we delve into each of these dysfunctions to provide a concise overview of their relevance to digital product managers.

The foundation of effective product management is trust. Digital product managers work at the intersection of various groups within an organisation, including executive leadership, delivery teams, product capability, technology leads and business functions. They also work very closely with customers. The best digital product managers prioritise understanding and reacting to customer needs, and this requires great relationships with each of these groups of people. Trust can be established in many ways: in the context of product management, this includes aligning products with the company's strategic intent, managing dependencies between teams effectively, and leveraging user-experience insights to make informed decisions.

Conflict is an inherent part of the digital product managers role due to the need for collaboration and decision making: harnessing the tension between customer needs and the company’s ability to deliver can lead to a competitive advantage. Digital product managers need to accept that conflict will occur and address it directly. The best digital product managers do not shy away from difficult conversations: open communication, transparency, and honesty are essential in managing conflict. Digital product managers should act as translators between stakeholders, ensuring that options and constraints are clear, and that decisions are reached through mediated discussions that align with everyone's goals.

Digital product managers should not just commit to "doing something" but commit to value-generating "outcomes". This approach promotes innovation and experimentation. When there are uncertainties, digital product managers should focus on knowledge gathering and data generation to uncover compelling value propositions. Commitments
should be transparent and supported by the right metrics to track progress toward the product vision.

Digital product managers have accountability across three key areas: prioritisation, team performance and product performance. They must prioritize outcomes effectively to avoid dependency issues and optimize business performance. Team performance should be monitored through frequent progress evaluations informed by reliable data. Digital product managers also bear ultimate accountability for their product's success or failure; this requires them to make necessary decisions and rely on the support of others, such as user researchers and developers. Digital product managers should also take accountability for actively managing the product lifecycle and discovery approach so that the product evolves in the right way.

Digital product managers need to think about results from many different perspectives, with an emphasis on “product success” and “customer satisfaction”. Trade-offs are often necessary for balanced decision-making: so establishing the right product metrics is critical. These metrics help digital product managers to prioritise features and product growth, ensuring that businesses remain competitive and responsive to customer needs.

In conclusion, applying Patrick Lencioni's "Five Dysfunctions of a Team" framework to product management highlights key challenges digital product managers must address. These dysfunctions underscore the importance of trust, conflict resolution, commitment to outcomes, accountability and results-oriented focus. In the dynamic digital product landscape, addressing these issues is essential for successful product management and customer satisfaction. The digital product managers role is important and strategic: it requires a deep understanding of the product today and how it will evolve in the future. Constant learning and adaptation are needed for sustained success.

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