Management Practices in Product Leader Organizations

Organizations that have become synonymous with product leadership and innovation have not reached such a position by chance. Rather it is by design that these Organizations continue to innovate and offer new products and services to the customers.

Managing creativity and managing innovation is a part of the Organizational culture and value system that these Companies have built to help sustain its growth trajectory.

The Organizations like Intel, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and other well known organizations excel not only in marketing their product, in proposing superior value proposition to the customers in order to grow their market share, but they also excel in creating, sustaining and nurturing an inner culture and environment where creativity thrives, people are motivated and eager to experiment with new ideas and think out of the box.

Managing creativity as well as managing huge number of creative geniuses working in teams as well as managing several projects at the same time proves to be a huge challenge for these Organizations. Realizing these challenges, these leadership Organizations have managed to redefine and build their HR systems and processes to suit such environment as envisaged by the management.

Companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel etc do not hire people easily. Though they are the ones to be present at the University campuses to select the best from the student talent pool, they have exhaustive selection processes that the candidates have to go through.

A lot of time and effort is spent on each recruit to ensure that the candidate matches up and is found suitable not only with the required skills and creative talent but with the right attitude and outlook to ensure he or she is able to fit into the Organizational culture and marry the value system.

The selection criteria at Intel does not revolve around defining and fitment of role and responsibility of a new position, but is defined based on the deliverables and the timelines for deliverables for every new recruit. The hiring managers then define the qualification, skills and experience required for the said deliverable.

These Organizations have tried and tested their innovative methods of forming cross functional and adhoc teams to manage projects and have also mastered the process of managing the teams, sub teams and their team dynamics. The projects being highly complex in nature, managing people and the projects as well as co-coordinating the all round progress is a challenging task for the management teams.

These Leadership Organizations are today setting the new trend and redefining the HR policies and processes. New methods of formal as well as informal communication, private networks, intranet and using social media networks to bring together the large community of employees using the latest technologies is changing the way the Organization’s communicate and manage employee relationships.

Companies that are innovation oriented have got to ensure that the individual goals are aligned with the Organizational goal. At the same time, managing highly creative resources, managing their growth and learning is not easy.

Continual investment into training, exposing and creating platform for interaction with the rest of the industry and markets as well as exposing the teams to new trends in various fields including technology and providing opportunities for learning is what makes these Organizations become leaders in managing their highly creative teams and managing leadership position.