Using 5 Dysfunctions Pyramid for better product strategy

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we continue the journey into my favorite product strategy tools. Today we're getting into the five dysfunction. Other team pyramid, a bit of a mouthful, but this tool, I, I cannot tell you, I come back to this day after day, no matter whether I'm working with a big enterprise or a startup, the five dysfunctions of a team is some groundbreaking work from Patrick Lindsay.

Yeah. And it is the perfect guide on how your team should behave when they're going about creating an idea or whether they're building a product or anywhere in between. This tool is in dispensable. Now you might be thinking to your mind to yourself like Mike, you know, we've talked about growth, marketing funnel, great product to been talking about the lean hypothesis, the [00:01:00] value proposition, canvas, you know, that teamwork.

How is that so relevant to product? Well, what I would propose to you is that if you don't have a great team, if you don't have a tool that you can look at. That can provoke you and nudge you to think about the best design of your team. Not only on the work that they do, but how they do it, then it doesn't matter.

What other great design thinking or agile or lean frameworks they use. It doesn't matter if the team is no good. So this has been the huge breakthrough in the work that I've done over the last. Year or so is that you cannot really entertain product development, product discovery without looking at team design simultaneously the way in which we collaborate is a huge dependency of any good thinking.

You must have the right alignment connection.  Trust [00:02:00] you must be cohesive. You have to be like a dream team. If you want to tackle big problems in the world and create solutions to it. So this is why we're going to look at the pyramid of the five dysfunctions of a team. Now, this is groundbreaking work that you can jump over to bottom-up dot IO and get a free copy of this.

Have a look at our agility in the digital age course, it's totally free.  You can get a complete breakdown of the five dysfunctions of a team pyramid. I'm so. Delighted to share with you right now on the podcast, this tool, because I think it's informed not only how I build teams, but how I lead a company of over 250 people.

These themes come back time and time again. This is the key go-to tool that I use when I want to crack how to improve a team. When I want to support them to be the best versions of themselves and to do some great work. [00:03:00] All right. So let's do two things together today. We're going to talk about what the problems are and the good news is I've got solutions too.

So I'll give you the antidote as well, but we have to get a little dark here. We have to go into the valley of darkness. We have to look at some of the things that we've all seen throughout our career that happen on teams. All right. So teams that aren't doing well. Teams that are not producing the results.

They will have five common factors. Now this is built around the enterprise, this work  frankly, you could easily apply this to sports teams and far beyond, but let's kind of cast our minds to our experience in the office at work. What would be the five things we could commonly use as a checklist, as the likely culprits of an underperforming team?

Well, [00:04:00] the, the first and foremost thing I would say to you is you've probably got an absence of trust. This is when you know, the politics are ruling the business. When it becomes a little dog eat dog, when people feel that there are members of their team. That are being selfish that are looking for personal advancement and putting themselves before the team.

That's what happens when you have an absence of trust, because to use a sporting met