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Construction invoice for Product Management

[Music] hi i'm todd berser and welcome to our three minute product manager discussion on structuring a product team so as we move into product management leadership positions as we become a vp of product management a director a head of product we take on the role of organizational architects so we are structuring our own product management team but we are also structuring extended product teams and by extended product teams i mean the set of people that are making our products so our product managers engineers ux designers so in this video what i want to do is take a look at six rules of the road for structuring product teams all right we're going to talk about designing for six things so we're going to talk about designing for direct customer insight diversity ownership parallel roles scalability and durability let's take a look at each one of these so on the first one so design for direct customer insight so every product manager should have access to their customers they should be able to run a discovery process for their product so for this video i am leveraging building off the work of rich mirinoff and i'm going to quote him here he said handoffs are the enemy of insight so let's take a look at some product team structures so here we've got a product manager working with a ux designer an engineering lead and a dev team or a scrum team and the product manager is able to here directly do interviews with customers and do concept testing with customers this is pretty good all right then some other teams some some companies have set up similar to this so you've got a market facing product manager that's working together out with customers they're going to share requirements they're going to hand off requirements to the technical product manager or product owner and that product owner is in turn going to work with an engineering team and a ux designer i kind of think the top structure works pretty well the bottom structure can be efficient it does work for some teams but because of this handoff you can be efficient at building the wrong thing okay let's go to the second rule of the road and that is designed for diversity so highly effective teams in technology companies often include diverse perspectives so you got a product manager engineers ux designers industrial designers this is a good thing if we take a look at the team structure that we've been you know thinking about it works pretty well it's got that diversity of perspective built into the team structure with other companies you sometimes see a structure like what's at the bottom and that's where the ux design team is separated out into a different group the product managers then just share requirements with that team and the ux designers deliver on those requirements kind of a job shop approach i think in this case you're really missing out on the diverse perspectives that ux designers can bring to these to these product teams all right then we go to the third row of the road and that is designed for ownership so we want small empowered motivated teams want clear ownership of products features segments okay so the team structure that we've been looking at works pretty well you can draw a circle around that and say you own this product on the other hand we can get more complex structures that might look something like this you've got a market-facing product manager reporting to a business manager sharing requirements with a technical product manager or product owner who's reporting into a different group an it group or or an engineering group in this case the the team on the left i think is going to struggle with ownership they're going to they're just going to be receiving requirements and delivering on those they're going to struggle with ownership i don't think that works very well all right then the fourth rule of the road is designed for parallel roles okay we want the rest of the organization to know how to work with us we want parallel roles so every product manager should have the same basic job just different products or features so that way the rest of the organization can work with different product managers in a very standard way so if your organizational structure looks something like this where you got product area one with a product manager product area two you got a market facing product manager and a product owner if your structure looks like this the rest of the organization is going to have to adapt every time they work with one of these product managers not a good thing then we go to the fifth rule of the road and this is designed for scalability so when we grow we want to be able to add product managers and product teams without changing our overall organizational structure so if you think about the structure that we've got here you've got a product area one got a team for that product area two there's a team for that if you're expanding your business you've got a product area three you just add a team with the same structure this is a good thing all right then the sixth rule of the road this is a hard one is designed for durability so we want teams that are stable over time because innovation comes from teams that know each other well and trust each other okay so revolving teams they're just going to struggle with commitment motivation ownership so the team structure that we've got here works pretty well except if you're doing frequent reorganizations and people are moving back and forth between different teams it just doesn't work that well all right six rules of the road i will say that each company is different and that your product team will reflect this however there's just product structures that are successful in many company types and conversely there are product team structures that just fail almost everywhere and to the extent that you can what i'm going to suggest is that you follow the rules of the road all right i'm todd burns if you've got questions on this you can reach out to me i've got my contact information here also i talk about this more in a udemy course that i've got vps and directors of product management finding excellence and the link to that course is below all right structuring a product team