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How to Build and Structure a Product Team
“As the role and importance of product managers have grown during the last decade, more product managers are shifting from marketing and sales departments to multiple functional areas responsible for defining as well as delivering products. From sales to design, product teams spearhead the activities needed to create, develop and deliver products and services to the marketplace.” Bridgette Austin takes a look at the functions and typical organizational structure of product teams. (via @bridge_austin)
How to Structure Your Digital Team: 16 Critical Roles
“Creating digital products is a multi-disciplinary process that blends creativity, engineering, strategy, customer support, legal regulations and more. Because of its complexity, many large enterprises and global brands undergoing a digital transformation struggle to structure their teams.” Howard Tiersky describes a base framework that identifies 16 key competencies that are part of creating and operating most digital products. (via @tiersky)
Should you structure your product team like amazon, spotify, or something else entirely?
“Effectively scaling a successful product team requires more than hiring additional product managers. You also need to consider the big picture. How will all the individuals on your team work together? And how can you help them operate as efficiently and friction-free as a well-oiled machine? This is where considering the structure of your product team begins to matter. Giving your team at least some structure as you expand will help ensure your organization divides roles and skills by the most effective means possible.” Shaun Juncal takes a look at a variety of ways to structure your product team and provides some advice on how to choose the best structure for your product team. (via @shaunjuncal)
The 5 roles of product development
No matter how many people you have on your product team, Matt Moore suggests that you should have each role tied to a Directly Responsible Individual. Matt has launched products with teams of from 1 to 100 people. He’s found that the successful product launches have always had a Directly Responsible Individual assigned to each of these five roles: strategy, engineering, marketing, analytics, and operations. Without knowing who owns each of these roles, you’ll experience breakdowns during the development process. (via @m3moore)
What makes up the product team?
“The basis of every great product is the team that builds it — and that team is naturally cross-functional. Releasing products and new functionality demands several diverse perspectives. A typical product team is led by the product manager, and includes leaders from engineering; program management; sales; support; operations; and marketing.” The folks at Aha! take a look at the roles and responsibilities of product teams and their place in product organizations. (via @aha_io)
Changing The Tires At 100mph: Becoming A Product-Driven Organization
When Forbes went from a print magazine with 8 million subscribers to a digital publisher with 60 million users it made some substantial changes in how it operated. Salah Zalatimo describes how Forbes became a product–driven company. Included in that change was the realization that “Becoming a product–driven company is not a technical challenge. It is a people challenge.” (via @salafel)
Product-driven vs. customer-driven businesses
When you decide how to structure an organization, you need to decide whether you’re going to follow a product–driven approach or customer-driven approach. Your decision impacts your product development, management style, marketing, IT and several other areas. Paul Miles takes a look at both product–driven and customer-driven approachesand concludes that there isn’t one right approach. It all depends on the business and the product that you want to bring to market. (via @bigredrec)
Building a product-driven culture
When most organizations start, they either focus on developing the ultimate product (product–driven) or on addressing “consumer demand and solving a pain point in their industry.” Brad Smith explains what a product–driven culture means, explores the pros and cons, and what you can learn about product creation from a few examples. (via @GetCodeless)
These Are the 7 Deadly Sins of Product-driven Founders
There are advantages to being a product-driven organization, but you want to make sure you don’t commit any of the 7 deadly sins of product-driven founders. Parul Singh reflected on her own experiences and experiences of several other founders to identify some of the blind spots that stunt and even kill the growth of the most brilliant and well-designed product-driven startups. Read this article to find out what these 7 deadly sins are and some ways to avoid them. (via @parulia)
Ford IT’s Product-Driven Organization Transformation
In order to adapt to the rapidly changing transportation landscape, Ford Motor Company needs to build better products faster and effectively use data to inspect and adapt. In this video from Agile & Beyond 2018, Aaron Rajda describes how Ford applies Agile and DevOps in order to become more product driven. Through this effort, they’ve built teams that support emerging solutions and “deliver value at market speed”. (via @aaronrajda)