 Hi everyone, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Today we will be speaking about how you can unlock high performance product teams. And my name is Irina Vysilkova. I worked in product, in product marketing, in commerce, at Meta, at L'Oreal, and even. I'm really, really passionate about teams and team management and people, and also I'm certified psychological consultant in personality diagnostics. So I'm really happy to be here today with you. And as we go through the presentation, please feel free to share your comments and questions. And I would love really to hear from you and hear your thoughts. All right, so if you would like to build a really high performance product team, where should you start? You definitely should start with people and people problems. And I would like to kick off here with the quote from the Richard Branson. Start with people, be a good listener, find empathy, understand emotions, communicate effectively, treating people well and bringing out the best. And it's all critical for the success. If you have this approach, you will be able to bring products and build businesses that really understand people. So start with people first. As we go through our presentation today, we would talk to you about high-performing team dynamics and you will gain insights into fostering high performance teamwork. We will unveil team personas and you will learn about different team personas and how you can actually effectively communicate with them and build a strategy of the collaboration. We will also decode the team needs and productivity equation and we'll learn about every different team need and how you could support them in achieving their needs and how this color correlates with their performance, with their motivation, with their productivity. And all these insights, they're relevant for the cross-functional teams but also for solar function teams such as product managers, product marketing managers or product designers. So when you need to build a really high-performance team, you need to have some specific mindset. So what are the building blocks of this mindset? First of all, your team should be aligned to the product strategy. It means that they know short-term strategy, they know the long-term strategy and they are aligned and committed to this strategy. Secondly, your team is customer-obsessed. They are customer-centric and they are data-centric. What this means? It means that your team is on top of your feedback of the customers about your product. They are spending time in one-to-ones with your customers. They know what your customers are talking about the product in social listening and they're obviously having a post-launch analysis to understand how the product was taking in the market. In terms of the data-centric, your team is able to understand quantitative and qualitative data and take decisions accordingly to these data points. Also, it's really important that your team is empowered and result-driven. It means that they feel that they are empowered to take decisions on their own level, they are trusted to do so, they are owning their own projects, their own space and they are responsible for their actions. The other important point is about team mindset. The team feel as one whole thing, one for all and all for one. This means that the team is generally enjoying working together, they are collaborating, they have a good communication between each other. They will definitely keep things tracking, they will not allow any ball drop and they will support each other. They will support each other and they feel comfortable being together. There is no tension between your team mates or your team members and if there are any issue, it can be easily fixed and it can be easily resolved. And Tim is cute as, cute as and cute. So cutie is really important because your team is always on top of the news of the industry, they know your competitors, they try your competitors. They are very well about strengths and weaknesses of your product versus competition and they are sharing these insights. They are sharing insights, ideas, they are brainstorming and they're open minded to do things in different ways. They are open minded to be creative and approach tasks differently. And this building block is important when you are thinking about your roadmap and insights because team are bringing these insights, they are inspired and you have a lot of things to work with together for the future of your product. Of course, if you would like to be a high performance product team, you should be a high performing team leader and have a mindset according to this. So what is important? It's important that you are really clear on the strategy and objectives. So you have a clear strategy in place, you have a key PIs, you know, what are the objectives? What is a good result is looking like? And your team is very well aware about this. You have a high emotional intelligence and you have a compassion to people. High emotional intelligence is something that is natural to some people and it's not natural to the other people. And it's okay, it's something that can be really developed and it's really important when you want to build a really comfortable, trustable space for your team and build this close, warm relationship with people. The team empowerment is very important that you spend time empowering your team to take actions, take decisions on their own level. You trust them, you trust them to be responsible for their projects, for their work and taking the actions accordingly. Also, your team should know that you have always own support for them. You have their backs. And it's important that you're making yourself available for their requests for help. And if you are not able to resolve some requests of help, you are able to find the people, cross-functional teams or leadership who are able to provide this support and help resolve team. The questions they are asking to be resolved. Then the other important building blocks which is relevant more to the solar teams that you are managing is thinking about team professional growth. So this should be ongoing mindset where you're investing time, understanding their professional growth, desires and needs and supporting them and tracking them to the success. And last but not the least is creating safe space. Safe space is when your team is open to share their thoughts, their ideas, they are asking each other for the feedback because they know, they will be heard, they will be supported and they will get nice feedback that will help you and then build a stronger product. So when you have a team, so how actually you can understand their personas, how you can collaborate with them effectively. There are several tools that actually help you identify their type of personalities. So for example, there are various type of personality tests and my favorite one is a color animal personality identifier test because it's quite easy to digest and it's very comprehensive and really very fun to do with your team. So the benefits of using this test is understanding the personas of your team members or teammates, understanding their strengths and differences and learning how you can collaborate and build collaboration strategy together. So it's really nice activity to do as a team. In my experience, people are always very open minded learning about themself and sharing these insights with their colleagues and discussing and brainstorming how they can collaborate effectively as a team. So feel free to suggest this to your team or if you would like to learn a little bit about the other teams or about different people, you can treat this theory as a guide because as we go through the presentation, you will see these personas are quite characteristic so you will be able to identify these people. All right, so as you can see on the right hand side, we have extroverted animals. It's a peacock and it's pumas and then punters and then on the left hand side, you have introverted animals such all and dolphin, so typically in tag. On the spectrum of all and dolphin, you will find more technical roles like engineers, data engineers or data scientists from maybe researchers. And on the spectrum of panther or peacock, you will find the roles that are generally they have to go to people, they have to align things, they have to communicate such roles, more non-technical like product marketing, maybe combs, maybe sales. Sometimes PMs are actually really, really, really great in these roles. So what is the typical about each personality type? As you can see, all is more diplomatic, it's more fact-finder, it's more precise, it's more logical personality. Then panther on the other hand side is more action-oriented, it's problem-solver. Sometimes can come across as aggressive or very independent. Dolphins on the other hand side are lower, they are more mature, they're really great team players, they're gentle, they're imparting and they are questioning. And the peacock are very enthusiastic, very convincing, they are very verbal, very optimistic and animated. Some personalities, how else could easily fall under the peacock. And every single type of personality has own motivations, core values and things they actually need to do a little bit better. And this really help us understand what to expect from these people. So for example, alls, they are really motivated to deliver things on very high standards, very detailed, very perfection. And sometimes you can see these people in that science or research and they really value to be right. It's important for them that the insights they are bringing, they are right. But sometimes for these people, it's really hard to make decisions and you may need to support them in these decisions. So the panthers on the other hand side is motivated when they have to solve the problem, they need to troubleshoot, they can showcase their authority, they need to develop different options, they need to reinvent some process. They're also very, very result-oriented and it's really valuable for them to achieve the result. But they are not really good listeners. So it's something they need to work through. Dolphins, they are more motivated when they have a secure environment, they have a lot of appreciations, guarantees, some known routines. Relationship is very important for them and they are really good at that. However, for them it's really, really hard sometimes to initiate things. So you might need to support them into initiating things. And then Peacock, this person is all about social recognition, they are motivated then they are able to provide services to people, to showcase them and be with people. And the core value for them is recognition. However, as they are very open-minded, they are very out there. Sometimes they need to check a little bit more on their behaviors to make sure that they are making the other people comfortable with their behaviors. And each animal, each personality type has a work pattern and it's a very distinctive work pattern. And if you know this work pattern, you can easily identify a collaboration strategy with this personality type. So for example, all is very system-oriented. They're really great at analyzing complex data, finding right insights, making risk assessments. They are more on the introvertial spectrum, therefore they prefer to work alone, they prefer to plan well ahead and they prefer to bring the things at really high standard. So if you need to collaborate with all, you need to talk to them from the data point of view. You need to respect their ways of working, you need to appreciate their insights and you need to allow them sometimes maybe a little bit more time to deliver the tasks. From the POMAS perspective, these people, they are also system-oriented. They are great at dealing challenges. If you need to troubleshoot and solve some things, reinvent things, this is the people. They are driving things and they are actually, they are extroversials and they are very good natural leaders. They really like to take control in the situation. So be very straightforward with these people, explain what you want and why, rationalize your request and create a lot of space for these people to action and run with the things. Dolphins, dolphins are amazing with people. They are very people-centric. They have very high work ethics. They have very high natural emotional intelligence. We can call them a soul of the team. They are on introvertial spectrum. They are natural team players. They like to have their routines and they want to stay outside of the spotlight and they generally are avoiding leadership roles. To work effectively with these people and preserve the soul of the team, you need to create a secure, predictable environment filled with empathy, appreciation and please don't put them on the spotlight. They are really uncomfortable with this. Peacock, peacocks are very people-centric. They are great in communication, negotiation, selling. They are very creative at problem solving. They are extroverts and they are good team leads, good teammates. They really like to be with people. So please give them recognition. Create opportunity to provide services, showcase their talents and be with people. So now you know which kind of type and persons you could have in your team. So what if you need to bring someone new to your team or maybe you need to bring someone new to your project? What are you gonna do? So first of all, we are all very keen to bring the people who are similar minded with us. They have a similar background. They have similar skillset mindset because it's easy for us to communicate with them. We are thinking alike. We are talking alike. However, you need to treat your team as one whole puzzle and each of you is a single piece of puzzle and you need to complement each other. You need to be very self-aware about your gaps and your strengths as well as your team, gaps and strengths and find the people who will complement these gaps. Therefore, it's always a good idea to hire people with complementary skills, personas, different backgrounds, different mindsets. Also, it's really important to understand that you bring the people or you hire the people that you can see progressing forward. One of my mentors in the past told me a really interesting thing and I'm taking this away with myself. They would never hire a person if they can't imagine this person being the air manager moving forward. And I think it's a really good way of thinking about hiring people. It's really good to have someone that you can see progressing forward and you can see in future them being your manager. You would be happy to work with them. Obviously, as you have some team, you have some specific personality types, you know them. You need to make sure that the people you are bringing in the really good fit for your team and they can easily work together and the harmony will be preserved in your team. So what is about teams productivity? How you actually can motivate people doing things and following the strategy and delivering things and being really motivated. For some reason, some people think is to deal with personal motivation, personal productivity and desires. In fact, it is to deal a lot with the leadership and how leadership is covering the needs of the team and covering their desires. It's very similar to any product purchase experience. You would not invest money or time in any product if it does not cover your needs, right? It's very, very similar. So here you can see a pyramid. We could say Muscle Inspired Pyramid and I map the needs of the team from the basic one to more advanced needs. And as you can progress from the bottom to the top, you can see that motivation, productivity and impact will be also growing from my experience. So if we will start from the basics, basic need of your team is ensuring that they have the salary paid, that they have vacations, that they have business tools and they have the year set up. And when you cover these needs, people really feel secure. It might sound funny, but I've seen a lot of people being demotivated and unproductive when their vacations are not signed off and the salary is not paid in time. So this is really, really a basics that you as a manager need to cover to fulfill their very basic need. Then the next one is making sure that your team and people working with you really onboarded to the work process. So they integrated to the process, they integrated to team members, they are communicating effectively, they are supporting each other, they are supported by you in setting their KPIs and setting their goals and they understand them. In this case, generally people feel included. They feel included and part of the team. The next one is making sure that team members are integrated in business. So this is about sharing the larger picture of the business, sharing the strategy and sharing reasons why their work is important, why their work is important for building this larger picture. And in this point, people started to feel valued. And the last but not the least is sharing top is tracking your team members to the success. So in this case, you have their progression path defined. You know what they want as their next steps and you're supporting them into progressing to these next steps. And of course, this is a sharing on top and in this case, you should see the highest motivation, productivity and impact. So the fulfillment team needs is really fundamental to engagement, motivation, productivity and the goals. And in my experience, as you progress from the basic needs to tracking your team to success and covering these needs step by step, you will see improvement in impact, productivity, motivation in your team dynamics. Great. Last but not the least, I really would love to share with you some recommendation of the inspirational books. So the first one book is from actually a founder of the emotional intelligence. Daniel really contributed a lot with his psychological and neuroscientific research into the definition of the emotional intelligence. He has a lot of different books. This is one of them that actually focus more on the emotional intelligence and leadership. So the next one is more about life examples of leaderships and different solutions and strategies that will make you thinking. And the last but not the least is more like autobiography about the key things and key challenges that Richard Branson have to overcome when he was building Virgin Empire. And he's really, really people manager and very inspirational leaders. So as we went through all the presentation, this is the key takeaways that I would like to share with you. First of all, we know that high-performing team should be aligned to strategy. They should be customer-obsessed, data-driven, empowered to make decisions, result-driven and very cutest about things and very creative in problem solving. High-performing team leader should be very clear on strategy, objectives have high emotional intelligence, be available to cover back of their team, create a safe workspace, empower them and grow them professionally. And it's really important to acknowledge people's different personas, create collaboration strategy, accordingly hire and bring people with complementary skills that are really good fit to your team. And team needs fulfillment is fundamental to engagement, motivation, productivity. You need to know your team needs and desires. So thank you very much for taking time with me today. I would love to hear your thoughts and your comments. Please share them, please let me know which things you would like to take away and you would like to put in practice. And good luck.