Accountability is a team sport

This is part 3 of the 4 part series: Growing eCommerce revenue $0 to $200MM at TripAdvisor

Lesson 3: Accountability is a team sport.

The pressure of owning a number can do funky things to your psyche. That’s especially true if the you’re faced with aggressive growth targets that can’t be hit purely through easy fixes or other forms of low hanging fruit. When the challenging times arrive (and they will, eventually. They always do.) It’s vital for the team to come together, bring their unique perspectives to the table, and 

At TripAdvisor, the Product function was the one accountable for setting roadmap, optimization / growth plans, and setting the pace for the team. This can result in a team culture where the Product Manager “comes up with the ideas,” UX " designs it", Engineering “builds the experiments”, and the analysts “measure the impact.” This puts 100% of the accountability for success on one person. You’ve essentially bottlenecked the ideation process. Surprisingly the teams I’ve seen who fall into this trap are the ones who have demonstrated early success as a result of picking the low hanging fruit on a problem or experience. If the entire team’s history is rooted in the PM prioritizing the fairly obvious fixes or improvements, which naturally turn into a series of small wins that add up to meaningful success, that team has missed the opportunity to build a culture where they can weather the harder times. 

In truth, I found we learn more from failures than from successes. Teams that create a culture of transparency and inclusion around the experimentation and learning process are much more resilient in the face of Big Hairy Audacious (BHAG) goals and no clear/obvious path to achieve them. 

Ways to foster accountability toward business objectives and ensure the best ideas are brought forward:

1. Lead from the rear. The primary expectation of the Product role is to get it right, not necessarily to be right. Bring multiple viewpoints and information sources to bear. Within the team, be an advocate and amplifier of quieter voices. Around the team, be transparent and set context of what’s going on and why. In other words, create an environment where everyone on the team understands what’s expected of them, and where they have autonomy and necessary resources to meet those expectations. As leader, your role is to solve the problems of the team so that they can do their best work. 
   
2. Share learnings on a regular cadence. Teams and individuals crave autonomy and purpose in their work, among other things. Execs crave business results, among other things. Having a forum for individuals to share what they’ve learned (test results, user research, competitive analysis, etc)  provides opportunities for ideation and new projects to be built off learnings. Establishing a regular cadence sets the expectation that learnings should be happening on-going. Making this weekly / bi-weekly meeting an open invite to everyone in the company who’s interested to attend, provides maximum transparency and opportunities for execs to provide course corrections as needed.
   
3. Use data to look forward.  Teams that uses their analysis firepower predmonitly to answer questions that other people in the business have asked are missing out on a big opportunity. Analysts who carve out regular time to explore data will find insights and opportunities that can be shared at weekly learning meetings and become focus points for team ideation on how to capitalize on underserved segments of the user base. To the analysts, this provides a seat at the table when building strategy, roadmap, or project plans.
   
4. Outcome-driven prioritization. Project prioritization is often a problem for product managers. They can feel caught between conflicting stakeholder desires, among other things, and a feeling of being the least liked person in the company. It shouldn’t be this way. For product managers that, as a rule, require data-informed, believable hypotheses as to what the expected lift in KPI will be as a result of each and every project in their roadmap, prioritization can be as simple as sorting by the “expected lift” column in a spreadsheet. Of course, like any rule, the art is understanding under what circumstances and how often is acceptable to “break the rule.”