16 Ways to Engage and Motivate Product Teams

Photo of Ron Lichty

Effective software development, and thus effective product management, requires a symbiosis – a tight partnership of product managers/product owners with product creators: the developers and testers and designers, and sometimes more, who craft our products.  Understanding what motivates programmers and programming teams is critical to engage and motivate teams to delight customers – and to avoid, at all costs, distracting and disheartening them. Ron will share 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams – to ensure that together we delight customers!

Points to take away:

  • Delighting customers is the metric to which we should manage and relies on tight collaboration between product managers, product owners, developers, testers, and designers
  • Product managers and development leaders are uniquely positioned to connect the dots and, together, motivate product teams

About the Speaker

Ron Lichty, Engineering Fire Jumper, Agile Consultant & Author

Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers.  Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually co-authors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).  Ron has spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels – at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple – to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO. 

He now consults across that realm, taking on interim VP Engineering roles, advising executive leaders how to untangle the knots in their product development organizations, training teams and executives in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum.  Ron has long been a popular speaker at product development and agile meetups and conferences. He can be reached at Ron@RonLichty.com