Building High-Performance Product Teams for Growth Stage Scaling and AI Success

Scaling a business and implementing an AI strategy successfully requires more than technical skills. It demands high-performing product teams that are resilient, creative, focused, and deeply empathetic. Whether you're defining your AI roadmap for business or moving from startup to scale-up, these five team traits will determine if you thrive — or stall out.

Here’s how to hire and build the kind of team that will drive your AI implementation strategy and help you scale with confidence.

Hustle: Finding a way 

Hustle is all about creativity and determination. It’s finding another way when the conventional path is blocked. It’s knowing when to charm, when to needle, when to escalate and when to throw down. It’s not getting stuck or frustrated when things aren’t going the way you wanted them to.

In AI projects, hustle means finding creative ways to source, clean, and label data — often when it doesn’t exist neatly in a database. It means navigating a fast-moving regulatory landscape, overcoming skepticism about AI value, and finding early pilot partners willing to take a risk with you.

So when you’re building your team look for people who:

1. Are resilient to change and challenges

2. Build relationships before they need them

3. Understand and navigate bureaucracy

4. Can come up with crafty and unique solutions to problems

5. Aren’t afraid to talk to just about anyone

Discipline: Staying focused amidst AI hype 

A new idea is exciting and addictive. You can see the possibilities everywhere. Every new prospect or client I encounter is deeply passionate about their new idea. The trap is that you try to go in too many directions at once and end up getting nowhere.

Innovative teams have the discipline to narrow the world of possibilities down to a single thing to focus on. Their discipline allows them to test, learn and iterate without getting off track. They focus on today’s problem of finding customers and meeting business objectives instead of tomorrow’s problems like scale.

AI teams face the constant temptation to chase every new model or trend. Disciplined teams stay laser-focused on solving real business problems and defining measurable outcomes. Discipline helps you resist scope creep when every stakeholder wants their own chatbot or predictor.

That’s not to say that innovative teams never get off track, because they do. What’s different is that someone notices, they point it out and the team refocuses their effort.

I have a favorite wrangler. She has an amazing ability to help people focus their efforts on what to do right now and what to save for tomorrow based on business objectives. I’ve written about one of our favorite exercises for this. It also doesn’t take long before clients adopt her way of thinking and are able to move quickly.

When your building your team look for:

1. The ability to create a framework that helps people focus in and make the hard tradeoffs

2. People who know the difference between today’s problems and tomorrow’s problem and communicate effectively

3. People who can steer the group back to the right direction if they get off track

   
   

Inquisitiveness: Curiosity Powers AI Innovation

In our office there is always a lot of discussion in person and over email about new technologies and trends. It’s this passion and interest in different verticals, behaviors, trends and technologies that that fuels innovation in a couple of important ways.

Research shows several benefits for curiosity on teams 

• Increased Engagement and Motivation (Kashdan et al., 2018)

• Improved Problem-Solving and Creativity (Reio & Wiswell, 2006)

• Better Adaptability to Change (Vogl et al., 2019)

• Higher Performance (Litman, 2008; Reio et al., 2006)

• Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration (Reio & Wiswell, 2006)

Broad Inquisitiveness 

A lot of innovation comes from taking a concept from one space and moving it to another space. The Wright brothers experience in building bicycles led them to take a different approach than their competitors and contributed to them creating the world’s first successful airplane. My experience working with different types of companies and non-profits gives me a wide array of inspiration to draw from.

Some of the best AI innovations come from borrowing ideas across disciplines: using anomaly detection techniques from cybersecurity to catch fraud in banking, or applying recommendation engine logic to employee training platforms. Teams curious across domains find unexpected wins.

Sometimes I encounter folks looking for partners that only want to work with experts in their industry. The good news is that you will get a partner that knows your industry but you might get the same thinking and ideas as everyone else. If you want an innovative team, look for people who bring a diversity of experience and a passion for continuous learning.

Deep inquisitiveness

My favorite thing about working for a museum was getting to dive into a new subject every couple of months. I learned about history, international politics, photography, technology and more. Then I’d take what I learned about and find a way to make it engaging for a more general audience.

Whatever the topic is, innovative teams dive in and quickly understand the business, customers and competitors. But they manage to keep an outside perspective and don’t get boxed in.

When your building your team look for :

1. Diversity of experience

2. People who are always reading and sharing new ideas from different areas

3. People who can dive into a new area and bring fresh perspective

4. A resistance to conventional or internally-focused ideas

   
   

Empathy: Essential for Human-Centered AI 

Marketing professors Kelly Herd (University of Connecticut) and Ravi Mehta (University of Illinois) ran a study with more than 200 adults to come up with potato chip ideas for pregnant women. Half was given the assignment directly and the other half were encouraged to imagine how the pregant women would feel while eating it. "Eliciting empathy has inherent value in maximizing creativity," Herd says. "We've shown that empathy can change the way in which you think…imagining how someone else would feel, can have a huge impact on creativity in general."

I had the privilege of doing a pro-bono strategy workshop for St. Jude and toured the hospital. It’s an amazing place. When a patient arrives at St. Jude they are transported in a red wagon instead of a wheelchair, at registration the desks are low enough patients can see and interact with the staff, every space is a colorful one and in one hallway are pictures of former patients one of whom is a PhD researcher at St. Jude.

Empathy helps them see the hospital experience through the eyes of patients, parents and siblings. The team understands pain, needs, behaviors, constraints, goals and values of the people they serve. Because of this they can create meaningful and impactful experiences.

Will a customer trust an AI decision? Will they understand how it was made? Teams need to walk in the user's shoes to ensure AI augments instead of replaces human judgment."

Innovative teams solve business and customer problems. These problems have an emotional and experiential component that must be understood to get the right solution. That solution needs to provide the right solution for the customer and business.

When you're building your team, make sure there are a few people who:

1. Actively seek understanding of the customer, business and stakeholders

2. Watch facial expressions

3. Put themselves in the shoes of others

4. Advocate for the little details that make an experience better

5. Make decisions based not on their own preferences but on how they think that decision will affect someone else

6. Care not just about the customer but the business and how staff will be affected by the product

7. When something is missed or wrong (and something always is) they are quick to spot the problem and fix it

   
   

Humility and Resilience: Critical for Sustainable AI and Scaling Success

I told a CEO I was going to get things wrong. I delivered on that promise and will continue to. I’m one of those people that needs to learn by getting bruises. I don’t particularly enjoy getting things wrong but I would rather have a small fail than an epic one.

I’ve had to eat my words and my ideas. I’ve crashed and burned in front of seven year-olds, been wrong about pain points, pitched a value proposition that had no value to the users and have had teachers look at me like I’m nuts. I invite and expect this.

In AI, even your most brilliant model will eventually degrade as the world changes around it — a phenomenon known as 'model drift.' Teams that succeed aren't the ones who get it perfect on the first try, but the ones who monitor, adapt, and rebuild without ego.

Humility is accepting that you don’t have all the answers and being willing to engage your team, stakeholders and most importantly customers.  Resilience is picking yourself up when your tests fail. Having both will keep your team headed in the direction of a successful product.

When your building your team look for people who:

1. Are willing to take risks and make mistakes

2. Engage others in brainstorming

3. Value learning from mistakes

4. Openly discuss challenges they’ve faced and how they overcame them or didn’t

   
   

Conclusion: The Future Belongs to Adaptable Teams

The world of AI and business scaling is changing fast. Building high-performance product teams isn’t optional, it's your edge.

By focusing on hustle, discipline, curiosity, empathy, humility, and resilience, you’ll create a team that can deliver exceptional products, navigate your AI roadmap for business, and scale smarter and faster than the competition.

Scaling with AI means embracing uncertainty, experimenting wisely, and staying relentlessly human-centered. The teams who do will shape the future."

Note: This is an update to posts in my archive

Image: A fun watercolor experiment my daughter and I did together