What makes an effective product team?
Missionaries, not mercenaries.
Mercenaries build what they’re told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. Dedicated/durable teams within a company act and feel like a startup. This is good.
See also Product vs. Feature Teams (Marty Cagan, SVPG).
Empowerment and accountability.
Product teams are there to solve hard problems for the business. They’re given clear objectives and they own delivering on those objectives. They’re empowered to figure out the best way to meet those objectives, and they’re accountable for the results.
The team should have high cohesion and low coupling with regard to the problems they’re trying to solve.
Clear roles and responsibilities.
An empowered product team must own the whole product. Owning the product means ensuring value, viability, usability, and feasibility. The responsibility for these is shared by three specific roles on the team.
Marty Cagan
In an empowered product team, the product manager is explicitly responsible for ensuring value and viability; the designer is responsible for ensuring usability; and the tech lead is responsible for ensuring feasibility. The team does this by truly collaborating in an intense, give and take, in order to discover a solution that work for all of us.
Size and composition.
Teams should not be too big. 12 engineers is as big as they should probably ever get (remember the 2-pizza rule). Could do with less though. Plus a designer, PM, and some supporting roles as needed. The right makeup of skills is more important than getting the size correct.
Reporting structure.
The product team doesn’t have a reporting structure. The team itself is flat. ICs report to their functional managers. Importantly, the PM is not in charge of anyone.
Collaboration.
Team is a group of talented people with different skills coming together to solve a hard problem. It’s supposed to be collaborative. Be careful about becoming too sequential between functions (e.g. product hands off to design who hands off to engineering who hands off to QA).
Additional reading
- INSPIRED, chapter 9: Principles of Strong Product Teams