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Best book or 2-3 on being a good project l team lead
There s many great resources on teams, leadership, collaboration etc. here.
What I haven't seen is a survival guide for the new project team lead on the day to day.
All the books I ve seen either take the easy PMI approach of assuming you re their boss.
Or assume you're leading an operational team with a defined function where it's mainly about throughput
This is an exciting topic for me.
Something I'm passionate about.
Now product leaders are speaking about how to transition away from the traditional style of project management to product management.
Where you focus more on business outcomes rather than just project outputs.
It is quite challenging to change that from the start if senior management are quite set in their old ways.
Product management books are interesting because they cover the agile management style of project management together with the other concepts of finding out the best way to deliver value to the customer.
I read this book which gives you advice on how to work in a cross-functional team on a more nitty-gritty operational level
The Art of Product Management
I should definitely read it again.
One of the best books on how to focus on delivering value to the end customer:
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
I have read this halfway.
It tells you how to work with different types of individuals in the company as well.
There's another new book that this author came up with
EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
I would like to order this book and read it as well.
Thanks Matthew. I agree. Long time agile guy - just done a design thinking course and SAFE 5 Product Manager cert.
My question is more on the day to day in the usual gloriously undefined role. Questions I often face are:
How to deal with team members who are perms and have alliances outside the team when I'm a contractor?
What brings the team together when my team are all working on different things? (you can only do so much social)
What to do when the business (who are above in the chain) want to 'borrow' my resources?
How do I deal with the old team lead who's still in the team and will dip in out of 'habbit'?
From what I see these are pretty common situations. I was hoping there would be a book that might cover 50% at least.
I will give my thoughts from my personal experience and knowledge from reading these books and courses.
You probably have lots of experiences and have employed lots of these methods.
Maybe some of these don't apply to your situation as well.
Summary of What I Think
The lack of longer-term direction is what makes the-day-to-day priorities unclear as a product/project manager and to your team members.
And defining a workable longer-term direction requires buy-in from different levels in the hierarchy.
More Details
My question is more on the day to day in the usual gloriously undefined role.
This lack of role definition and direction is quite pervasive in many organisations.
Probably not an organisation that is product-centric.
Sometimes companies hire an external contractor just to manage the building of certain features rather than to focus on larger business outcomes.
The senior management does not see project/product management of key importance in the organisation.
Some interesting examples in this book
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
How to deal with team members who are perms and have alliances outside the team when I'm a contractor?
Do you mean that you are hired as an external contractor to be a project manager?
I'm guessing that this is a question of building more authority and trust with team members.
So that you have more influence within the team compared to outside-the-team members that have potentially conflicts of interests.
This is rather challenging if you are only there for a short-term and need to build trust with team members fast.
One way is to prioritise small fast, visible results.
And champion the team and the results of the team to the senior management.
Also to constantly remove roadblocks for your team members to focus on work.
Those books do help in this aspect to build trust and authority within the team.
What brings the team together when my team are all working on different things? (you can only do so much social)
Building a product strategy so that the team understands priorities, what to work on and what to not work on.
So that less micromanagement is required.
This is challenging as the senior management should arrange teams around product outcomes and align incentives.
If you have a contractor and have little room to choose your team, then it is challenging.
The beginning part involves lots of mapping out the interests of your team members through conversations and discussions.
Then you can involve them in building out the strategy as a way to get their buy-in.
Then setting objective and key results at different time scales help to align the teams around outcomes and how to track metrics to stay on track.
What to do when the business (who are above in the chain) want to 'borrow' my resources?
Having the strategy and OKRs in place will help to defend yourself.
But people will indeed always come to harass you.
For example, VP of sales will indeed sometimes come in to ask you, your engineers and your designers to help with product demos.
In this Udemy course I took in the past
Todd Birzer Product Management 101
Todd Birzer says you just have to say no tactfully if it is not in your priorities.
How do I deal with the old team lead who's still in the team and will dip in out of 'habbit'?
Do you mean you as the contractor is in a way competing with an old team lead on who will lead the team?
Thanks Matthew. All good points. The PO or prod mgr and backlog is a powerful combo. However not many companies r organised that way. I m in IT so what I often see is:
- Mgmt only interested in managing up/puts everything back on u
-Â Perms/outlasting the contractors who have been brought in to get things moving
- Mgmt bringing in consultants to do their job. Then consultants upsell their ppl and try and take over the project teams
- the age old fight between biz and IT for control of the IT projects. Amped by MarTech bringing marketing to front. HR and marketing r always frenemies. Talk collaboration while ruthlessly gunning for power
I think you re right it's a bunch of tough political problems. Anyway I m in the right place to work on them. And I ve survived for 20 years so never say quit.  Probably no book for that.
IT! Thanks for sharing more on this topic.
The book that comes to mind is
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
It is a novel that goes through a newly promoted IT executive who has to solve lots of IT problems.
I guess it's not exactly your scenario as he has more authority.
But he is new so he has to prove himself as well and deal with political challenges.
The PO or prod mgr and backlog is a powerful combo.
Companies may be blindly applying the agile methodology, which is one of the root causes of the problem.
Adopting agile methodology without focusing on
- product discovery - finding out what delivers value to customers, making prototypes, etc
- business outcomes - what actually works for the business
causes management to focus on churning out features.
On point 1, these features end up not delivering value to the end users.
On point 2, the projects are misaligned as the features do not come together to fit the bigger business objective.
What ends up is that the backlog gets longer and longer.
Everyone gets lost in deciding and choosing what to do next.
There are no clear priorities and a solid direction to head in.
I think you re right it's a bunch of tough political problems. Anyway I m in the right place to work on them. And I ve survived for 20 years so never say quit.  Probably no book for that.
That's a lot of experience.
Probably no book can replace those 20-years indeed.
