# Strategic Frameworks for Resolving Product Team Conflict

**Podcast:** All Things Product with Teresa and Petra
**Published:** 2026-09-08

## Transcript

Hi folks, this is All Things Product with Petra Wille and Teresa Kors.
And we're so happy you're here.
Petra, I want to dig into a topic today that is very common.
I'm sure you've seen it before.
It's this idea of when a product team, so we're encouraging product trios to collaborate cross-functionally.
We do.
We do.
What happens when they struggle to get along or there's conflict or they don't know how to resolve differences?
I get this a lot.
And we can get into how I help with this, but I also know you have some super awesome soft skills strategy here that I would like to hear about.
But really, let's just frame it as we have a product team.
They're going about their daily life.
They're doing their stuff.
Inevitably, conflict happens.
What should they do when that happens?
Retrospectives.
So the thing is, what...
What really is I can get so emotional and passionate about that topic because I know agile, it's so old.
Nobody wants to talk about it anymore.
But I'm always wondering why are we not at least taking the things that have really worked well for so many product teams?
And this is like pause every once in a while and talk about efficiency.
That is what it's all about.
us as a team how are we collaborating how do we approach our work is there a team culture that everybody is subscribing to all these kind of things do we love pair programming or not do we value everybody's time in being on time for meetings whatever it is that people need to discuss um i think it's important that we give room for that in our calendars and i think it's even more important that whoever does it is good in facilitating these sessions.
I think the skill of facilitating a group conversation, and that could be a retrospective, that could be a workshop, a stakeholder workshop, something like that, let alone user interviews, but that's a different kind of skill.
But facilitating...
such a session where people have to talk maybe about interpersonal conflict, maybe about why is this one person always taking over this other person in the meeting.
So stuff that is really tricky to talk about and that needs to moderate it well, that needs to prepare it well.
Somebody has half the time and the skill to prepare these sessions and to facilitate these sessions.
So I'm very passionate that there need to be some people somewhere in an organization doing that well.
and I have clients where the teams have the skills, so where they do moderation and facilitation round robin.
That's rare.
And I have a lot of clients where they still have a good old agile coach sitting somewhere, our scrum master, doing this really well because that's what they've done in the past a lot.
and i always encourage the product people to learn that skill as well because it's it's an important skill and you cannot only use it on your team you can use it in whatever team workshop situation how to prepare the workshop how to facilitate it how to make sure that the people really talk about The underlying problems that you see as a facilitator may be clearer than the actual team.
And what are good?
For example, we can share that in the show notes.
There is a retro methodology that I love for that, which I call the team radar, where you, for example, if you sense the team has a particular problem, then this is one axis of your radar.
And then you add seven other ones.
And then you ask the team to reflect on those.
and you can see what the team thinks and it's not so much about what you think because that doesn't matter you're the facilitator that's your role um but you can see what the team thinks about a particular topic so yeah facilitation and time to have something like a retrospective that's would help what's your take you said like you have ideas and tactics different tactics yeah i want to i want to unpack a little bit of what you said first so the first thing that you said made me think of team charters.
So really just talking about this, like, what do we have conflict about?
So I think I'm going to create two really broad buckets.
The first is teams have interpersonal conflict that often tends to be around norms, communication styles, personalities.
And I think a lot of what you talked about with these norms...
One tactic I really like to see teams do is to literally create a team charter.
And I think when we create team charters, we tend to create them from the business point of view, like what's our outcome?
What's our mission as a team?
That's all great.
But I actually think where team charters are way more powerful is to, as a team, have a conversation around, these are the hours that will be available.
These are our preferred communication styles.
This is how I like to make decisions.
Service level agreements within the team.
Yeah, exactly.
And really surface this around like how understanding the individual preferences on the team so you can start to develop team norms that are documented, explicit, because oftentimes they're implicit.
And I think just having that in place can help with reducing this like interpersonal conflict.
It's not going to be 100%, but reducing it from the get-go because there's at least clarity.
Yeah.
We know in the intro when I was asking this question, I was actually thinking about more of team conflict around like what to build.
And like the designer wants to do the design this way because it's more usable, but the engineer wants to do it this way because it's easier to implement.
And I think the tactic I have there is part of the reason why I advocate so much for trios to do discovery together is because you operate from a shared understanding.
And that shared understanding...
helps to resolve these conflicts.
They happen less often.
But I think in both cases, even if you have a team charter, even if you do team discovery, you're always going to have moments where you have conflict.
And I think this is where what you're getting at of like, how are we going to resolve this conflict?
How are we going to work our way through this conflict?
Somebody needs facilitation skills.
And then you framed it in two different ways, which I want to unpack.
with you which is one is can someone on the team facilitate those conversations versus do you need a third party to facilitate those conversations and who might that third party be do you want to talk a little bit about like how would you think about what's needed in what situations so if it's a really interpersonal one-on-one conflict if it's two people involved and then obviously I would not advise to bring in the entire team to then watch two people kind of solving the conflict together then this is kind of I don't know if there's counseling mediation, whatever you call it.
Sometimes HR is offering such a service.
In doubt, you could do a joint escalation.
So the two conflicting parties could together write down what their conflict is all about.
That already sometimes helps to solve the conflict.
If you just like agree that there is a conflict and then you try to put it in writing, then sometimes.
Things are closer than each one of you would have thought or something like that.
And then you go to whoever is responsible.
That's most likely one of the line managers of these two people.
So they decide on either we go to both of them.
or we basically pick one of them and go and say like, Hey, look, this is the conflict that we're having.
And there is a difference again in, is it a very interpersonal conflict?
Has it to do with their value system or personal value system?
Or is it something like the designer wants to do something one way, the product person wants to do it the other way.
Hopefully then leadership would actually say like run an experiment because it's.
Sounds a lot like opinions.
If two people holding opinions, they maybe hold them for a good reason.
But still, in business, I would then ask them to design an experiment that looks in whatever sort of form that they can test for which opinion maybe holds after the experiment run.
And then HR might be something for very...
if it's a more hefty conflict, if the work environment already turns toxic because of these two people having this conflict, then I think this is a good primer for maybe HR is where you actually want to go because they oftentimes have somebody's guilt in this conflict resolution conversations, I'd say.
But hopefully it's not that.
So hopefully the team, for example, has this.
long, not so important, not urgent, but annoying problem of two people always coming late to meetings, for example.
So oftentimes things like that are kind of lowering the mood over time.
And at some point you have to turn and face the strange.
So you have to turn and look.
at the problem and then think about, okay, what are we going to do about it?
And you have to have a conversation about it because there is no right or wrong solution for it.
There needs to be a solution that the team decides being their solution.
And that's why an outside party could be helpful because it A, brings an outside perspective.
It B, and this is how you would pick the person.
They need to be as, is neutral the right word, as neutral that nobody else from the team thinks like they already have a preformed opinion about the particular topic.
So, and sometimes even the agile coach was not a good pick in the past, right?
So even if the team had an agile coach, the agile coach would obviously sit with the team, spend time with the team, hang out with the team, be in all the stand-ups with the team.
And of course, they have a lot of context and know all the history about the conflict.
So even then, it would not have been the ideal mandate for them to moderate the conflict, maybe.
Sometimes even the product person was the better pick then because they didn't spend every day, all day long with the team.
If you have a very skilled engineering team, oftentimes you see the product person not attending every send-up because it's basically a team meeting.
And then sometimes the product person was the better pick.
And if that is not working, you can still ask the team if they feel comfortable facilitating it.
And sometimes a senior engineer has built very solid.
I saw amazing facilitation skills sitting with senior engineers.
if they were allowed to build that over time.
But some of the best retros that I sat in were with senior engineers that had very high standards on their work ethics and how things are approached and how they, all the extreme programming folks, for example, they had a clear framework and a clear idea for how they think the work should be done.
And sometimes facilitating towards such a goal.
was helpful as well.
So pick the person wisely and really think, is it beneficial if they know the context or if it's beneficial if they don't know the context?
I think that is important.
And then pick somebody who has decent facilitation skills and can basically leave their opinion.
at the door and just really be in this facilitator role.
So you should not write any post-it on virtual or physical walls as a facilitator if you facilitate the session other than the headlines.
So the headline post-its, you're allowed to write those ones.
But other than that, it's teamwork.
So you need to leave your ego at the door and really be the facilitator of the session.
I think there's a classification from academic research that's helpful here.
Academics that study like team interpersonal dynamics make a distinction between task conflict and relationship conflict.
So task conflict is we disagree how to do the task.
Relationship conflict is there something about the way that we work that puts us at odds.
And I think team charters help with relationship conflict.
They help with surfacing the individual preferences on the team and how we're going to work together.
And I think...
Like shared discovery helps with task conflict.
Yeah.
And then I would say who should facilitate varies.
So with relationship conflict, this is probably where HR is coming in, right?
If the two people, well, first of all, relationship conflict, I would say you want to try to resolve one-on-one.
It's not a team issue.
It's a one-on-one issue.
If you can't resolve it yourselves, that's probably where HR comes in.
Yes.
I think task conflict, even if it's just one-to-one, I would want the trio or the broader team to discuss it.
I agree.
Because oftentimes what looks like two people having a conflict over a task, usually there's other people on the team that share that task conflict.
They're just not verbalizing it.
Or someone else on the team has an alternative approach that can actually resolve that task conflict.
And so I like to see task conflict being discussed at the team level.
And then I think if you can't resolve it at the team level, there's a couple of strategies.
As you mentioned, you can run some experiments to collect data to try to resolve the task conflict.
Joint escalations.
Sometimes, yeah, that's exactly where I was going next.
So sometimes it's not about what the customer wants.
It's about we're having a debate about.
business strategy context yes now we need to escalate it to a leader and get another opinion yes but i think that framing of like let's first get clear on is it relationship conflict or is it task conflict helps you with how do i what's the first step i take to resolve this what kind of facilitator might i need yeah um and then i think i like it one one thing i've heard in a lot of your responses is this idea of facilitation is a skill you have to press for it you have to know how you're going to run the session.
You can't have a dog in the fight.
You have to set your ego aside and like surface the perspectives in the room.
And that can be really hard.
And I think like one thing I would love to explore with you is, I was just going to say you can't have a dog in the fight, but I don't think that's really true.
I think a skilled facilitator can surface all their perspectives and share their own perspective, but it's really hard.
They have to make sure they're not advocating when they share their perspective.
Exactly.
And if you see a skilled facilitator, by the way, they sometimes use their body and where they position it in the room to make clear which hat they're currently wearing when saying something.
So I saw that.
I saw a skilled facilitator using two chairs to say like, hey, especially when they're team members, right?
And they need to facilitate the sessions.
Then they sometimes just like change chairs and say like, okay, now this is with my team member head.
And now I'm moving back into my facilitator role literally.
So they really change.
I know in the virtual space, that's maybe not so easy.
Maybe change backgrounds.
I don't know.
You get creative people.
But that is important.
And yeah, as you were saying, not every conversation is a conflict.
So there are friction points in teams.
They just need to be discussed.
So you just have to have the retro and you have to have the conversation.
And it's not a big conflict and it's easy to solve.
And sometimes it's just like an idea and a slight change in how you set up a certain meeting or a certain wiki page or whatever it is that makes the entire team slightly more efficient, slightly more oriented, maybe more transparent to other teams, whatever it is that you want to solving for.
And these are in particular task related things that the team can discuss on their own.
There is not even a conflict inside.
It's just you need to look at your own ways of working.
You need to look at they're still in favor of what the team currently wants to achieve and is working towards.
You have to revisit your.
product principles, for example, every once in a while, if they're still working well.
And all of that needs time and still a bit of lightweight facilitation and a bit of a structure to reflect on.
And that's the classical retro item and facilitation, I'd say.
You know, one thing that you just touched on that I really like is this idea of like conflict is normal.
If you're on a team, conflict is going to happen.
And there's actually that same academic research shows that task conflict is actually good.
Task conflict is how we get to better problem solving.
Right?
So you want task conflict.
If there is no task conflict, that's probably an indicator you don't have psychological safety on your team.
Yeah.
It's a good frame as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think like the absence of task conflict is probably a red flag.
And so it really, if we assume this is going to happen, it's really about as a team, how do we get really good at working through this?
Yeah.
space and time and facilitation skill.
Yeah.
I think relationship conflict is a little bit different.
I think relationship conflict will happen.
But it's not necessarily like we don't get a benefit from relationship conflict.
I think it's more we have to just manage it.
It's usually annoying.
Yeah.
I love it.
That was interesting to unpack the topic.
Yeah, I agree.
Thanks, Petra.