Personality of the Week: Jennifer Agbaza
Jennifer Agbaza has dedicated over 5 years to understanding product management nuances, refining leadership capabilities, and leading teams through phases of hypergrowth.
As a Senior Product Manager, she observed product management adapt in phases of business expansion to include leadership, expanding on an executive focus.
Managing a product in a growing business is more than simply speeding up feature creation; it demands an organized product team to maintain scalability, effective decision-making, and prioritization always aligned to the organization’s top business goals.
One of the initial challenges to be met in phases of hypergrowth is to define an adequate structure for a product team. Early on, companies have generalist teams who handle multiple types of jobs; but specialization usually sets in as the business continues to grow.
Jennifer recommends a blend where generalists retain their role in discovery endeavors while specialists join for product lines where they have existed before. The approach maintains flexibility while enabling thorough domain specialization where necessary. Still, she advises against excessive segregation, where silos may develop and stifle collaboration between functional disciplines.
Another crucial component of product scaling is having in place a strong decision-making structure.
Without defined decision structures, bottlenecks develop, thus stunting progress and leading to frustration for teams. Jennifer highlights the importance of assigning authority for decisions in accordance with defined structures.
An example is using the RAPID structure, where Responsibility, Accountability, Consultation, and Input are defined. In dividing up power to decide, teams are able to make decisions quickly without sacrificing alignment.
In addition to practices and structures, Jennifer highlights the importance of the role of Senior Product Managers in building culture in growing teams.
The alignment of product lines is a strong challenge, and is made more so by the larger organization. Jennifer has made good use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to allow for prioritization between various teams.
In setting clear measurement objectives aligned to the business’s overall vision, product managers can prioritize impact, and not simply product-centric priority. Still, she is cautious in recognizing implementation needs to be done carefully; ill-defined objectives may promote alignment but also limit future innovative thinking by tying up teams in measurement metrics.
In addition to practices and structures, Jennifer highlights the importance of the role of Senior Product Managers in building culture in growing teams. As companies develop, recruitment and mentorship functions take on paramount importance.
The ability to assess candidates on their technical ability, flexibility, and thinking for strategies is crucial for Senior Product Managers. Mentorship programs by Jennifer in her teams have helped in on-boarding and ongoing improvement. These programs improve product team capabilities and help in building future product leaders.
Hypergrowth presents inevitable dangers, and several of them have beset Jennifer in her time. Amongst the most endemic of them is the challenge of misaligned incentives, where local maximisations by individual departments do not lend to the business’s greater goals. In addressing such an issue, she highlights the importance of keeping clear sight and holding regular check-ins between functions.
Jennifer has made good use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to allow for prioritization between various teams.
Another endemic trap is prioritisation mayhem, where an excessive range of needs for customers, executive pressures, and market instability creates reactionary decisions.
Jennifer highlights the importance of having strong product planning in order to keep everyone aligned and on point, thus preventing the team getting pulled in several directions. Scaling product teams is probably one of the toughest jobs for any Senior Product Manager. Using right structures, decisions, alignment systems, and focused leadership, Jennifer Agbaza has effectively tackled hypergrowth situations.
The ability to have scalable and sustainable expansion is evident to everyone; it is not only expansion but also having strong, enduring teams, successful implementation of good decisions, and maintaining clarity in the midst of massive changes.
