In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Julia Austin about what the lean product and process development principle “Put People First” looks like in practice.
An executive fellow at Harvard Business School, Julia is an executive coach with experience leading successful product teams in tech at companies like Akamai Technologies, VMware, Inc., and DigitalOcean. She is also author of the book, After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup.
My conversation with Julia explores:
- How to create effective collaboration across people and teams to support an excellent product or service
- Where leaders and teams struggle in product development in 2025
- How leaders can support people to drive high-performance
- Standout moments of people working together vastly improve a product and service
- How to leverage AI while keeping human beings at the center of work design
- Why a culture of care and respect builds teams of responsible experts
I have a question here. Nowadays, the competition in any commercial market is very high. Company owners would not spend time and capital resource to train up his employees like some years ago. In such case, what could be done to enhance the competence of the staff so they can work together as a strong team to win the project or order from the clients in the market. Is there least-cost mechanism that can achieve such purpose? How could the new staff learn fast and effectively from the projects to gain the valuable experience while doing the project ? What the management can do to let the employee feel with the sense of belonging when working in the company. Thanks for your kindly attention. Looking forward to getting your valuable comment
Stephen – thanks for the thoughtful question; potentially a lot to unpack here so i will focus on a few basics. I am going to start with the premise that most people (99%?) want to do good work – which implies they know what the actual work is and what good looks like. So that is a place to start – not necessarily define everything an employee does, but begin with defining the core or critical aspects of the job: how does one go about designing that new manufacturing process? how do I schedule an appointment for a patient who wants to see the doctor? How do I assemble a Maurice salad? Then supply a mechanism for people to ask for help when they are unable to successfully do the work. Have a well defined help-chain, which creates opportunities to develop the employee on the job, while doing the work. Finally, provide the employee the opportunity to actually improve the work while still creating value for the customer and achieving important performance targets. When people understand their work, know helpful help is available when they run into problems and can actually improve their own work – the sense of belonging happens. One more quick point – companies can be much more effective when they pivot from training-centric employee development to employee development as something integrated right into the employees’ daily work. If you haven’t read the book Managing to Learn by John Shook, you may want to take a look at it.
Eric Ethington, Senior Coach, LPPD @ LEI