Retaining product talent and cultivating high-performing teams over time can be a significant challenge. Product managers, designers, engineers, and other roles are in high demand, and turnover is common in the fast-paced world of technology.
In this post, we’ll explore best practices for retaining your top product talent and building teams that deliver results. We’ll cover strategies around compensation, career development, culture, feedback, goal-setting, and more. By taking a holistic approach across these areas, you can boost retention and enable teams to thrive. Retaining institutional knowledge and enabling teams to “gel” over longer periods directly translates to better product outcomes.
The Cost of Turnover
Before diving into specific tactics, it’s important to note why retaining talent should be such a priority in the first place. High turnover exacts major costs, both direct and indirect:
- Direct costs – recruiting, onboarding, ramp-up time of new hires
- Indirect costs – loss of institutional knowledge, impacted morale, delays and missteps
These costs add up, with some estimates putting the cost of turnover at 1-2x annual salary on average. Beyond the financial impacts, frequent turnover can demotivate remaining team members, hamper product development velocity, and make it hard for teams to build chemistry.
Given the high stakes, product leaders must make retention a priority. The strategies explored in this post aim to address why people leave roles in the first place. By getting ahead of the major drivers of turnover, you can hold onto more top performers over the long term.
Competitive Compensation
While compensation is not the only factor, it is critical to getting retention right. Employees want to feel that they are paid fairly relative to their skills, contributions, and external market rates. When compensation lags, talented team members are likely to jump ship sooner rather than later.
Here are a few best practices around compensation and retention:
- Benchmark salaries annually against industry standards in your geography. Tools like Glassdoor and Payscale, as well as peer networks, can help determine competitive rates.
- Structure total compensation – salary, bonus, equity – to be compelling within your market. Especially monitor equity, as poorly structured programs can be demotivating.
- Check in periodically with individuals about whether they feel their pay is fair given expectations and external options. Be prepared to discuss and potentially make adjustments.
- Consider retention offers for valued employees if you have reason to believe they may be looking elsewhere. A 10-20% raise is often much cheaper than losing someone and recruiting a replacement.
Getting compensation right is table stakes for reducing turnover, even though other factors matter as well. Invest time upfront in developing competitive compensation bands, and be proactive about keeping your fingers on the pulse of what constitutes fair pay.
Career Growth & Development
In addition to fair pay, your team members also care deeply about being able to grow and develop in their careers over time. Employees today, especially Millennials and Gen Z, are loathe to stay stagnant for too long. They expect active career development, not just financial rewards, from their chosen employers.
Here are some areas to focus on for enabling career growth:
- Career pathing – Work with team members to map out longer-term career paths, including clear milestones and expectations across multiple seniority levels. This pathing gives people visibility into how their role can progress.
- Learning & Development – Invest in internal learning opportunities like workshops, mentoring programs, and online classes. And support attending external conferences/events as well.
- Increase scope & impact – As team members ramp up, look to expand scope, impact, and ownership. More junior members may take on individual features, while senior members own entire products or business lines.
- Management opportunities – Enable people managers to hone their skills by managing workflows, projects, and eventually teams. Give high-potential mentees exposure to execs.
- Stretch assignments – Develop people by allowing them to tackle stretch assignments beyond their core role, like leading a new initiative or troubleshooting a system issue. Take on some tasks beyond your own core role as well.
- New teams/projects – Allow team members to develop new skills and perspectives by rotating onto new teams or starting up new projects. Avoid getting siloed into one area.
Take a genuine interest in each person’s career goals and aspirations, and look to provide development opportunities that align. Have regular check-ins to assess progress and whether expectations are being met.
While you can’t guarantee quick promotions or specific roles, facilitating steady career growth is essential to retention. Enable people to stretch themselves year after year, expanding their skills and impact.
Constructive Feedback & Coaching
Beyond career progression, team members also care about improving their actual day-to-day responsibilities. An environment centered on regular feedback, coaching, and mentorship keeps people more engaged and invested in their roles.
Set the tone by giving your direct reports frequent constructive feedback – both appreciation and suggestions for improvement. Where possible, provide this feedback close to the time of impact for better context.
Train your team leads to better coach and mentor their reports as well. Great people managers turn to provide actionable feedback into an art form.
Look to build a culture centered on a growth mindset where feedback is viewed as essential for reaching potential rather than punitive. Emphasize that success is about working smarter, not just working harder.
In addition to informal feedback, establish channels like monthly 1:1s for managers and reports to formally discuss recent performance. Conduct annual/biannual reviews to discuss performance across longer periods as well.
These touchpoints give team members visibility into how they are progressing and what they can improve. Feedback, when delivered skillfully, demonstrates your investment in each person’s development.
Recognition & Morale
As important as feedback is highlighting areas for growth, don’t overlook the power of positive recognition as well. Appreciation initiates a positive feedback loop – when team members feel valued and recognized, they invest more in their work. And they know their hard work will continue to be appreciated.
Recognition should be frequent and tied to specifics – “Thanks for putting in late nights to get this release out the door”, or “I liked how you facilitated dialogue between our engineering and design teams”. For extra impact, share the recognition publicly on the team chat channel.
Consider instituting peer bonuses as well so team members can recognize each other. Or implement badges/points that accumulate into rewards.
On a larger scale, develop venues like a monthly team meeting for people to shout out teammates or showcase great work to the broader group. Announce promotions, work anniversaries, or major contributions at all-hands meetings.
Get creative and celebrate both major milestones as well as smaller wins. The little efforts here and there add up to an engaged, motivated team. People stick around when their work feels meaningful and impactful. Recognition helps demonstrate that in a visceral way.
Inclusive, Supportive Culture
Thus far we have mostly discussed tactics related to the actual work – compensation, development, feedback, and recognition. But it’s also critical to zoom out and examine broader cultural indicators that affect day-to-day experience.
Teams thrive when surrounded by cultures that demonstrate care, inclusion, support, and trust. Culture is set by behaviors far more than words. As a product leader, scrutinize whether your team’s culture is conducive to retention and engagement:
- Work/life balance – Promote sustainable work styles. Be realistic about deadlines and staffing needs.
- Inclusion & belonging – Foster environments where everyone feels welcome to contribute. Value diverse perspectives.
- Psychologically safe – Encourage openness and risk-taking. Adopt a growth mindset around failures.
- Autonomy & trust – Enable people to manage their workstreams with latitude. Checks for alignment rather than micromanagement.
- Cross-training & exposure – Facilitate collaboration across disciplines. Bring junior members to key meetings to expose them to decision-making.
- Manager accessibility – Ensure people managers make themselves available beyond formal touchpoints. No “black box” when it comes to providing guidance.
Listening and being responsive to how your staff perceives their day-to-day experience is just as vital as dialing in compensation and development opportunities. Don’t underestimate the value of fun team events, inside jokes on Slack, and bringing dogs to the office. Retention hinges on affinity and engagement as much as transactional benefits.
Be Extra Attentive to Star Performers
While you should strive to be a supportive manager to all of your direct and indirect reports, make extra effort to connect with star performers in particular. Your A players – the talented product managers, stellar designers, and wizards of engineers – will always be in high demand. Other companies will be attempting to woo them away.
Check-in regularly with your top talent about what inspires them about their work and what frustrations they need help resolving. See how you can clear roadblocks or find new challenges they might be seeking.
Probe why they chose to join your team in particular in the first place, and what has them staying thus far. What would be most likely to compel them to leave? Ask what they might want longer-term out of their career over the next few years.
Your highest performers won’t stick around forever, but the more attentive you can be to their engagement and growth now, the longer you can retain them. Prioritizing your stars pays off in their elevated contributions while you have them.
Quarterly Check-ins on Retention & Morale
Stepping back from specific tactics, it’s wise to institute an ongoing pulse check on retention and morale. Set time at least quarterly to more holistically probe factors impacting turnover, anonymous if helpful. A blend of structured questions and open dialogue yields insights.
Example topics to explore:
- What morale boosters or energy zappers have you observed recently?
- Do you still feel motivated about the work and your growth potential here?
- What’s one thing that would increase your likelihood of staying if improved?
- Have you noticed peers disgruntled about particular issues lately?
Keep an eye out not just for explicit complaints but reading between the lines. Are certain teams overworked? Are star performers disengaging? Has decision-making become overly top-down?
Address nagging issues before they escalate rather than being caught unaware by sudden departures. Be vigilant about potential warning signs that might not organically bubble up to you otherwise. Use regular check-ins to take the team’s pulse – both as a whole and each member individually.
Right-sizing Team Capacity
One of the most avoidable yet pernicious turnover and morale killers is the creeping scope overload placed on teams. It happens gradually – a new project here, some added responsibilities there. Before you know it, the team is overstretched without proper staffing.
Set realistic scopes for what teams can handle at sustainable capacities. Err on the side of too little initial scope vs. too much. Say no more than yes to additional asks.
Watch out for symptoms like missed deadlines, dropped balls, and team members working nights and weekends to keep up. Take those as signals of overloaded capacity needing immediate intervention.
If teams indeed need to absorb increased scope, right-size resourcing accordingly. Push hard for additional headcount as soon as overload creeps up. Allow team flexibility around contracting certain tasks out or shutting down lower-priority projects as well.
Scope creep is an inevitable pressure, especially at fast-moving startups. But as the product leader, vigorously protect your team from unsustainable demands. Make tough prioritization tradeoffs decisively when needed. There will always be more potential scope than capacity – keep the two balanced.
Overburdened team members vote with their feet – they leave for saner jobs. Retention depends directly on not stretching teams past the breaking point.
Distributed & Remote Teams
A special note for product teams that are fully remote or support distributed team members. Remote work enables invaluable flexibility but also introduces a greater risk of isolation and disconnect if not managed carefully.
Take extra care to cultivate personal connections despite lack of in-person contact:
- One-on-ones for remote folks should focus more on overall morale than task check-ins.
- Encourage small talk and water cooler chat channels to emulate office socializing dynamics.
- Bring remote members into meetings via video more proactively so they can stay abreast of key discussions.
- If possible, organize occasional offsites where the full team can come together face-to-face for better bonding.
- Profile and publicly recognize achievements of remote team members, so they feel visibility is on par with the on-site team.
Because remote team members operate with less visibility by default, you have to be extra vigilant about engaging them. Ensure they receive similar career development mindshare from you and their other managers. Make them feel recognized as integral parts of the team despite not sitting together day-to-day.
When remote folks disengage, they can disconnect altogether from company culture and loyalty. Be doubly attentive to nurturing their sense of inclusion.
Take a Full Lifecycle Approach
We’ve covered a variety of tactics related to compensation, development, culture, and more that feed into retention. But it’s critical to understand retaining talent as a full lifecycle approach that starts even before employees join your team.
Here is a quick view of retention across the employee lifecycle:
Attract -> Hire -> Onboard -> Develop -> Reward -> Promote -> Offboard
At each phase of the cycle, focus on conveying what makes your product team unique – meaningful work, growth potential, and supportive culture. Share frank perspectives from current team members during interviews.
Celebrate new hire join dates as “work anniversaries” each year they stick around. Invest heavily in onboarding new reports with regular check-ins.
When valued team members do depart, conduct gracious offboarding with exit interviews and even small farewell gatherings. Part positively so alums feel warmly towards your team even after leaving.
The companies that achieve the greatest longevity of tenure take a long view toward showcasing their unique employee value proposition at each step of the employee lifecycle. They don’t just work hard to attract and hire strong talent – they onboard effectively, develop deliberately, reward appropriately, and even offboard respectfully.
Adopting this lifecycle mindset ensures your retention efforts extend beyond the transactional here and now. You increase the chance each employee joining grows into a valued long-term member of a flourishing team.
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Key Takeaways
Retaining top talent and minimizing turnover should be priority one for any product leader. High-performing teams compound results over time – but only if kept together long enough.
By focusing holistically on compensation, career growth, culture, capacity, and more, you can attack the various root causes behind voluntary departures. Track attrition data over time as a vital metric alongside other product KPIs.
No silver bullet solves turnover universally. Retention requires examining your own team’s pain points and at-risk employees. Dive deep into regretted attrition and sniff out early warning signs.
Do whatever it takes to hold onto your hard-won top talent for as long as possible. Leverage their institutional knowledge and enable further levels of team maturity. Just remember – it all starts with investing in people first.
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