Building High-Performing Teams is Product Management

Nikita Dyer, Product Lead at Trello, shares her approach to building high-performing product teams, achieving alignment on critical decisions, and navigating change and uncertainty.

Nikita has built product organizations on three continents. First in Asia, then in Europe, and now in the United States. Her experiences have helped her learn a variety of critical product management skills and develop a unique approach to team-building and leadership. She’s now applying what she’s learned to building the product organization at Trello, a company that was recently acquired by Atlassian.

Nikita says product teams need three key ingredients to achieve high performance:

1. Focus - understanding of long-term business and user goals
2. Alignment - communication across product, engineering, and design
3. Respect - acknowledgment for functional expertise

Nikita approaches hiring and leadership to establish these conditions. However, she doesn’t mandate processes or long-term product roadmaps. Rather, she instills values, such as “don’t do nothing,” and provides frameworks for decision-making, such as answering “how does it move the business forward?” and “how does it benefit end-users?”

You’ll learn a lot from this episode about hiring, leadership, and culture.

Here are the highlights:

• The key ingredients for a high-performing team (4:50)
• How Nikita approaches hiring given her criteria for a high-performing team (11:20)
• How Nikita keeps her team motivated and productive (14:50)
• How Nikita leads her team when facing uncertainty and change (18:40)
• Nikita’s approach to instilling process (26:15)