Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams. Ron Lichty has been a product manager, a CTO, and a VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners. Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - to ensure that together that you delight customers! Points to take away: ▪ Delighting customers is the metric to which we should manage ▪ Delighting customers relies on tight collaboration between product managers, product owners, and development teams ▪ Product managers and development leaders are uniquely positioned to, together, motivate product teams ▪ Product managers and product owners are uniquely positioned to connect the dots BIo: Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html). Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple. He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com) Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences.