--- title: "Change your mind: your product is your team" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/change-your-mind-your-product-is-your-team.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/change-your-mind-your-product-is-your-team.html" published: "2011-08-13T04:05:30.203000+00:00" updated: "2011-08-14T08:31:26.783000+00:00" tags: ["Guest Post"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "José Ramón Díaz argues that a new team leader or project manager must shift focus from product to team, since the product is only as good as the team." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Change your mind: your product is your team > The following is a guest post by [Jose Ramón Díaz](http://najaraba.blogspot.com/), Agile coach at Biko. > > About Jose: > > My experience has always been in software development in the Java world. I am currently in charge of a development team in Biko2. > I am interested in promoting the teams to become effective and efficient, while also enjoying their work. I try to do my best as agile coach. You should change your mind about what you are building when you become project manager or team leader (as a boss). Forget your product. Look at your team. Suddenly, you do not have to worry about technical decisions or pretty interfaces. You must realize that the basics of your work has changed. My own inspiration is the mantra "team = product". **The product will be as good as your team is**. The behaviour of your team will determine the qualities of the product. So, your product as project manager is the team. Invest in the team. This will change dramatically your efforts, now redirected to make the team to grow. I first read that idea in the book “[Software for your Head](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201604566/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=iserializable-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0201604566)”, by Jim and Michelle McCarthy. This was annoying and shocking for me. But now I believe every little effort to improve your team is translated to the products they create. And you must be ready for that. Your behavior must change to let your people do their best. If you have been assigned as project manager recently, start studying again! (little advice: read, and read a lot!) You have no more technological related problems. I love Cockburn´s cite: “If you do NOT know anything about human behaviour, you know very little about software development”. So, stop and think about your previous work, do you really know something about people and their behaviours? Start changing your focus. From product to team. From technology to people. Pay attention to people and identify the phase in which your team is and what it needs to evolve. Find the right leadership at the time, but admit you can not get to become the leader, but only that person who turns mediocre teams into great teams, a great manager. If you keep thinking about building products, these will be only as good as you were able to create managing and controlling your team. However, if you facilitate the emergence of the full potential of your team, the product will be enhanced and enriched by many people and their synergies. ## Read next - [12 Lessons Learned for a New Team Lead](https://www.5whys.com/articles/12-lessons-learned-for-a-new-team-lead.html): Guest post by Oren Ellenbogen with 12 lessons for a new team lead, from writing down daily decisions and handling cynicism to making others shine. - [Making your team manage their own work](https://www.5whys.com/articles/making-your-team-manage-their-own-work.html): Lior Friedman explains how a team leader can stop being the task dispatcher and teach the team to divide its own work using a visible task board. - [Leadership and the mature team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/leadership-and-the-mature-team.html): Mike Burrows responds to the three maturity stages, arguing self-organization goes beyond self-management and mature teams still need leadership. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/