Team alignment is the key to ensure high-performance teams because for many reasons, team members are often ready to work hard but not sure about their goals. especially if there is no common strategy among the members of the team.

In this case, too often, one or more members begin to invest time and energy in a direction that does not bring concrete results. At best, it causes frustration and demoralization at worst, it creates conflicts within the team. This explains why so many organizations have so much difficulty in maintaining a high level of performance despite the efforts made by their teams. They never seem able to reach their full potential.

It happens quite often in a company that people from different teams working together on the same project don't use an existing common vocabulary to set priorities and coordinate their work. This is known as "the tunnel problem" because, if you think about it, it's like everyone always looking the other way (in line with what they are doing) instead of looking ahead towards the goal. No matter how hard everybody works, the results are not optimal because some team members were working on something less important than something another member was working on at that moment. All this effort it's then diminished by this lack of coordination between team members.

When considering a business, a research study conducted by The Gallup Organization suggests that businesses can increase their chances of success from 10% to almost 50% if they select the right employees. That is staggering. What is even more amazing is that there are many companies who conduct interviews without using any structured behavioral interviewing processes and wonder why they have problems with turnover, quality of hire, and performance. It would be nice to think that once you identify a great candidate, someone who has extensive experience, education credentials and excellent work history/references that adding them to your team means there will be instant alignment and dramatic improvement in your organization's overall performance. Unfortunately this is not always the case! This article will help you understand the challenges that are typically faced by hiring managers and provide you with some guidance on how to address them more effectively.

It's challenging enough to find qualified candidates, but it is even more difficult when two of the most important contributors to success in any environment - experience/education/credentials plus attitude/ability to fit with your company culture- are not aligned with your needs. As if this isn't enough, many hiring managers face additional significant problems which occur once they choose a candidate.

Have you ever made an ill-fated decision? If so, then you know what happens next: You realize that the person does not meet all of their job requirements or The individual is not comfortable working in a team environment or You can tell that the candidate is not going to fit into your culture. This often occurs just days after you have completed the hiring process and the individual has started working. Unfortunately most people as a part of the digital product management do not realize this until it is too late. A new employee who does not meet all of their job requirements will cost your company time, energy and money with little positive return on investment. In addition, employees who are not comfortable in a team environment may create problems for themselves and others, which drives down morale and productivity across the board. Employees who do not fit into your organizational culture also require extra management and training processes and drain time and resources from others while adding little, if anything to the bottom line. It is critical that a company assesses cultural compatibility prior to hiring employees, as well as during the initial weeks of employment.

There are many things that a company can do to ensure they hire for cultural fit within their organization including creating an organizational culture that is attractive to prospective employees, using assessment tools like the Organizational Culture Assessment Tool (OCAT) and asking interview questions that determine long-term compatibility between candidates and the company. By taking time before bringing any new employee onto your team to focus on organizational culture, you will save your company precious time, energy and money later down the road.

Creating an environment with which applicants feel comfortable is extremely important. When potential candidates visit your business they should be able to gauge whether or not they are willing to dedicate themselves to your company's vision. If they have a negative impression of your organizational culture before being offered an interview, it is unlikely that you will be able to convince them otherwise during the hiring process.

This goes hand in hand with pre-employment testing, which is used by many companies in order to make sure that applicants are compatible with their organizations on key personality factors including motivation, values and goals. These tests work well because they give both applicants and employers insight into how candidates would most likely fit within their predetermined culture. By ensuring compatibility between the candidate and the organization early on, you can prevent future problems by knowing what types of employees will least likely succeed at your company.

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We believe that product management is the most important function in a technology company. It's like an orchestra conductor: someone who can lead and inspire different teams (e.g. developers, designers, marketers) to work together towards a common goal — only if they all trust and follow the leader will they be able to produce beautiful music (well… hopefully).

Here are my top 7 things one should learn about what it takes to become a great B2B SaaS Product Manager:

1. Project Management Skills: Prioritizing tasks and communicating status updates proactively with key stakeholders such as the CEO / leadership team. Great PMs know how to break up big projects into smaller ones and cascade these down into their own backlogs. They create actionable tasks for teams to complete and track these in project management tools, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.

2. Technical Product/Market Understanding: Product Managers should be knowledgeable about what their current user base looks like (e.g. type of users, how many are free vs paying users). More importantly, they should also have an understanding of where their product or service can expand into next to capture additional market share. This includes identifying new feature opportunities as well as knowing when to cut back on "nice-to-have" features that do not impact the core experience for both new and existing users.

3. Ability To Craft A Compelling Business Case For Why A Feature Should Be Built Or Why A Competitor Feature Should Be Acquired: PMs should also be able to articulate why a feature is needed and would help accomplish a specific business objective. This requires having a thorough understanding of the current state, as well as what will need to change if a new product goal is being pursued.

4. Ability To Craft Compelling Product Experiences: At the highest level, PMs should have an ability to visualize how their product or service will look from a user's perspective and craft that into something customers will love. In practice, this means building features that are not only useful for your customers but also fit within your company's overall messaging strategy which can oftentimes be quite complicated at scale with many different stakeholders involved. Your target audience is a key component, but it's just one of the many pieces to consider when building a product from scratch.

5. Business Acumen: If you have only been exposed to product management through consumer-facing startups where growth and virality are top priorities, this attribute may come as a shock for some PMs since revenue isn't necessarily king in those environments. After all, your startup could be successful by simply not going out of business! However, at enterprise companies, your decisions will need to be justified in part by how they help grow the company's bottom line over time. This means that understanding the financial impact of any decision you make will play a critical role in whether or not that decision gains approval from stakeholders with budgetary authority.

In the early days of a startup, this perspective may not matter as much since most companies are pre-revenue and thus have no direct control over their revenue. However, once the company begins scaling its user base and is trying to monetize those users effectively, knowing how your decisions will affect things like LTV or churn will be critical for making decisions that increase revenue. In the words of CEO Andrew Chen, " A PM's success should ultimately be measured by how well they contribute to company metrics ."

In addition to understanding financials at a high level, you'll also need to understand which specific numbers indicate healthy growth and retention. While these metrics can vary from business-to-business, there are a handful of important numbers that most companies monitor.
According to Andrew Chen , you should be paying attention to the following metrics:

⦿ Monthly Active Users (MAU) is a measure of how many individual users interact with your product in a 30-day period. It's important for understanding the overall size of your market and user base, and can provide valuable insight into which features or geographies need more attention.

⦿ Daily Active Users (DAU) measures, unsurprisingly, daily activity by your MAU base. This metric gives teams insight about the intensity of use around their product, providing them information about areas they might want to encourage growth. For example, DAU might tell you whether are using just one key feature frequently while ignoring other areas of your product. It can also help you understand what times and geographies need more attention by providing information about activity patterns around the world.

⦿ Monthly Active Users (MAU) is simply the sum total of your daily active users over a 30-day period. MAU gives insight into overall product stickiness and usage levels, which might be important for understanding long term contract value or how well your sales and marketing efforts are working in aggregate across various geographies and time zones.

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