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 organised product team to maintain scalability, effective decision-making, and prioritisation always aligned to the organisation’s top business goals.
“One of the biggest early challenges in hypergrowth is structuring product teams correctly,” says Jennifer Agbaza. Early on, companies have generalist teams who handle multiple types of jobs, but specialisation usually sets in as the business continues to grow.
Jennifer recommends a blend where generalists retain their role in discovery endeavours while specialists join for product lines where they have existed before. The approach maintains flexibility while enabling thorough domain specialisation where necessary. Still, she advises against excessive segregation, where silos may develop and stifle collaboration between functional disciplines.
“I’ve seen companies go too far with specialisation, leading to silos that slow down decision-making and stifle collaboration,” Jennifer explains. “The best approach is a hybrid one where specialists complement, not replace, generalists.”
Jennifer recommends a blend where generalists retain their role in discovery endeavours while specialists join for product lines where they have existed before.
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.
The alignment of product lines is a strong challenge and is made more so by the larger organisation. Jennifer has made good use of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to allow for prioritisation between various teams. In setting clear measurement objectives aligned to the business’s overall vision, product managers can prioritise impact, and not simply product-centric priority.
Still, she is cautious in recognising 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. “OKRs should be directional but flexible enough to evolve with market shifts,” she warns.
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 based on their technical ability, flexibility, and thinking for strategies is crucial for senior product managers.
In setting clear measurement objectives aligned to the business’s overall vision, product managers can prioritise impact, and not simply product-centric priority.
Jennifer has built mentorship programs in her teams that have helped in onboarding and upskilling dozens of PMs. 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.
Another endemic trap is prioritisation mayhem, where an excessive range of needs for customers, executive pressures, and market instability create 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.
