My Secret To A Happy Product Team

Handling product development teams has been exciting and insightful for me and I have been doing it since the last 3 years now. From the initial days when we were planning our product it was clear that to have a great product its extremely important to build a rock solid product team because product development takes time. What that means is you need to have a team that stays long and keeps working happily.
To make things exciting I kept on trying different techniques like conducting hackathons, appraisals, team meetings and appreciating the best performers etc to keep my team members always on their toes but some of my observations were the complete opposite and these were great learnings for me which have helped me come out with a more standardized recipe to manage product teams and keep all my employees happy and more importantly satisfied so that they enjoy every day and keep going.
Following were my observations:

Appraisals, hackathons, appreciations etc worked as great tools but with time I realized that these were short-term techniques or just happy moments. I could see that within the first year or so things worked good but each time it was just for short durations.

Being a passionate developer and to attract more such developers in my team I had to market our work culture specifically creating some hype around the way we solve challenging problems. This helped me create some excitement around the initial development period but I could not generate enough challenging work all the time. Finally the momentum started dying as the work became more repetitive and no more remained exciting for them.

Banning sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc will never work. Most of the companies do this but will never succeed to create a healthy product culture with such policies.

Keeping all these facts in mind I tried with something very basic which became my secret routine and works great for me and my team. For product teams to sustain and keep going with the same joy it has to be a routine at work which can be followed for as long as required. Happy moments can not help the cause because they are too small. After following Jason Fried, Founder of 37 Signals it was absolutely clear that work happens in moments and cannot be forced upon. What it means is that quality work happens in short spans and the rest of the time is spent to do everything else except work. That is kind of fundamental behavior because forcing people to work for 8-9 hours everyday, banning websites etc will just not work for long-term. It becomes a burden for employees when they have to do something forcefully and they will never enjoy it.
A mix of 3-4 hours of quality work, some social networking, watching videos or browsing the internet, having conversations and short breaks is what combines to make a great day in the modern work culture. I tried this and it actually worked great even for me as I myself felt satisfied at the end of the day because I was able to do a lot without feeling burdened. Over a period of time after applying this strategy I saw better productivity and amazingly my team members even enjoyed attending office on weekends because it became fun and a routine for them which gave them enough satisfaction that pulled them towards work.
This routine is what I feel, the secret recipe for product teams and hope it works for you as well. If you have any other suggestions or ways by which you are creating a really healthy product culture at your workplace, you are most welcomed to share it with us.
*Note: All these views are my personal and as per my learnings and experiences. If you do not agree with them simply ignore but if you like them and it works for you, please share...

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