Leadership lessons: Ted Lasso's winning way

June 11, 2023

I played soccer while growing up and immediately became an Arsenal fan when I moved to London. Arsenal was a local club and top of the league at that time. The clincher was Arsène Wenger. He stood out from the other managers as he didn’t come across as a hot head, prima donna or just a total jerk. The players respected him, and he respected them.

Similar characteristics stood out to me while watching Ted Lasso. Ted was the anti-coach. He didn’t yell, instead he encouraged. He wasn’t arrogant, instead he admitted being a work in progress. He didn’t know all the answers, instead he sought advice and guidance from those around him. Through his actions, he empowered his players to be more by working together vs. against each other. The end result, he formed a more effective - and a winning - team.

Yes, I know - Ted Lasso is not real. Yet the principles he espoused are and apply directly to today’s working environment - especially for manager’s seeking to create top performing product teams. Today’s articles explore these themes.

In the prior newsletter, I focused on psychological safety. You’ll see why I’m bringing up this point up shortly…

At the start of his time at AFC Richmond, Ted Lasso placed a sign reading BELIEVE above the door in the locker room. The sign wasn’t perfect. It was a bit crooked and stuck to the wall in a wonky way with athletic tape. What was perfect was the meaning behind the sign. He encouraged his players to be their best, to believe in themselves, just as he believed - and saw - the best in them.

Take a minute and consider, does your team know that you have their back? Do they know you support and believe in them? Or maybe you don’t. Think about what that says about your team (or potentially you) as well.

Let’s run with the theory that you have a team with potential. How can you let them know a la Ted Lasso that you believe in them too? The article “5 ways that Ted Lasso creates psychological safety for his athletes”, provides a great starting point.

  1. Give Second Chances: By giving [Jamie] Tartt a second chance, Ted Lasso helped create a sense of psychological safety in the team. Apply this same principle and let your team know making mistakes is ok, and a second opportunity will be provided, especially when taking on new challenges and seeking growth.

  2. Admit that you don't know everything and ask the team their opinion: After arriving in England, Coach Lasso admitted he didn’t know everything about the beautiful game. It’s hard for team members to approach a manager, even one who has said they are just a Slack away. Instead follow the Ted Lasso way and seek out your team’s opinions. Doing so shows you value their judgement and increases their connection to the rest of the team and to you. 

  3. Be vulnerable: This might be a shock, but none of us are perfect. Ted Lassso admitted going to therapy. By sharing ways he was a work in progress, he encouraged his team to share their thoughts too. Think about the last time you shared a bit about yourself. If you open up, your team is more likely to come forward and share ideas too, including ways that could make the team even better.

  4. Rally around a common theme: Putting up a sign saying “Believe” might have seemed a bit tacky at the start, but it became a rallying cry for AFC Mission. Does your team (or organization) have a shared Mission, Vision, Strategy, and Goals? If not, you may find people are uncertain how to prioritize or know where to focus as the ultimate direction is unclear.

  5. Be Curious Not Judgmental: In my course People-First Product Leadership, I do just that - I share how to put people on your team first. “This is really the secret to Lasso’s ability to win people over, he searches for their strengths and leans into them.”  Again this approach creates psychological safety. It also enables diverse teams to come together, acknowledge their differences, and lean into their strengths.

If you follow Marty Cagan and have read Empowered, you’ve likely seen a diagram similar to the following:

But, how do you create a Product Vision? I enjoyed this article partly because it was ironic. The author is anti-framework, yet ultimately provides a framework for product leaders to follow when creating a product vision.

A good vision should be clear, punchy, and inspiring. It should rally me up and reading some template seldom does.

Step 1: Framing - First step is to frame your thinking. Get into the vision building mindset by brainstorming. Then prioritize your ideas based on market research, customer input, and other data sources.

Step 2: Employ a Template - Format your prioritized ideas using an existing template. The author suggests Elevator pitch, Roman Pichler’s Vision Board, walk into the future, newspaper headline, or tweet it.

Step 3: Craft your vision statement - This is the hardest step as it calls for you to “finesse everything you’ve done so far into a short, clear, and inspiring statement”. Don’t go it alone. Remember Ted Lasso and involved your team in the exercise.

The author wraps up with a few tips, including:

  • Dream big

  • Make it vivid, so people can visualize it.

  • Be clear and concise (jargon free zone)

  • Make it emotional. 

  • Complement your organization’s vision.

  • Finally don’t try to perfect it. 

You’re working through Marty Cagan’s pyramid or maybe you’re a fan of the Reforge Product Strategy Stack. You’ve read the article above and have your product vision. Now you’re ready to tackle the product strategy.

In this article, Gibson Biddle shares “this is the foreword to a twelve-part series on product strategy”. Twelve? Yep, twelve. Let’s try to consolidate as we’re busy people. We have a Product team to lead. If you recently took a Robin Arzon Peloton class and heard her say she doesn’t like hacks, well then, let’s use the word “summary”.

  1. Use the DHM Model to provide the high-level hypotheses for your product strategy.

    1. How will the product delight customers?

    2. What will make the product hard to copy?

    3. What are the business model experiments required to build a profitable business?

  2. Run experiments (have a target metric in mind) to prove or disprove each of your product strategy hypotheses (what is the problem you are trying to solve). Biddle defines this approach as Strategy/Metric/Tactic.

  3. Reverse the process if step two is proving tricky. Work with your team and list all the projects you believe are important, then group the projects into “themes”. The theme often equates to a “simple” product strategy statement.

  4. Go small. If you are a big enough product team that you have swimlanes or pods, you can ask the leads to repeat steps 1 to 3 and define a simple strategy for each area of the product organization.

  5. “The roadmap is an artifact — an expression — of your product strategy.” You have your product strategy statements. Now you bring them to life through a roadmap.

  6. Rinse, lather, repeat. As companies grow and time moves on, people may forget the product strategy. Remember the marketing rule of seven and repeat, repeat, repeat… Biddle calls this approach “rinse, lather, repeat.”

  7. Each quarter revisit your product strategy. For example, you can determine if the problems to solve are still relevant or have other priorities arisen, share results and learning from the past quarter, update the roadmap to reflect key projects for the next quarter, and share the updates with cross functional stakeholders (seven times aka rinse, lather, repeat).

John Cutler might not be a fan of Robin Arzon as he starts the post with “I strongly believe in the power of language to "hack" organizational challenges.” Since I like both John Cutler and Robin Arzon, I’m going to gloss over any differences they may have and move on to the value of John Cutler’s article.

You’ve completed your product vision > strategy > principles > goals. Do a happy dance. Or if you are Lancaster, tear up some paper coming out of the printer. Yes, my dog truly did eat my husband’s working-from-home work.

Now comes the tricky bet, how do you stay on track? “Caught between the dysfunctional world of delivery-centricity and the utopian world of outcome-centricity (and solution agnosticism) mixed with far-off quarterly and annual goals, teams sometimes lose the plot.“

To keep teams on track, identify the key milestones or goals along the way. The milestone should not be easy. It should be a bit uncomfortable. That’s a good thing as you want to stretch yourself as well as your team. Remembering Ted Lasso, your team knows you have their back (and they have yours), so try and achieve more than was expected. What’s the worse thing that could happen? You could make a mistake. And, that is entirely fine and expected.

If you don’t like the word milestone, John Cutler likes to think of milestones as stepping stones. He asked his team"What are your stepping stones to get from here to there?" The question captures the idea that you are trying to get to the other side, but you need to think through the steps along the way to reach the other side.

Today’s article was a lot of fun to write, so I’ll close out with a bit more humor and leave you with John Cleese on the Five Factors to Make Your Life More Creative. I think Ted Lasso would approve as well.