Product Management Fundamentals

Ten pillars of successful product teams

1. Having a sense of purpose and meaning 2. Encompassing varied skill sets and expertise 3. Being empowered and held accountable 4. Staying nimble and focused 5. Having a flat hierarchy 6. Understanding the importance and meaning of collaboration 7. Preferably co-located 😏 8. Adopting a manageable scope of work 9. Possessing longevity and durability 10. Working with ‘balanced’ autonomy

People are the heart of a cross-functional product team and defining roles and responsibilities will be key to its success or failure. Therefore, a product team’s structure, strategic planning, processes, and culture need to continuously be tuned for effectiveness.

A product team is a group of people who bring together varying skills and responsibilities and feel genuine ownership over a product or at least a meaningful portion of a larger product. This is why product teams are frequently referred to as dedicated or durable teams or squads (a term coined primarily by Spotify), to emphasize that they are not formed solely to work on a standalone project or feature, but rather as cross-functional teams to solve critical business and social problems.

Successful product teams are built on human relationships, expertise, and an obsession with solving difficult problems. They don’t have a project mindset (i.e. a fixed start and end date) and find meaning in the long-term outlook of the work they are performing.

To achieve this, there are 10 principles that every successful product team must have.

The 10 pillars of successful product teams

1. Sense of purpose and meaning

Successful product teams are true believers in their product’s vision and have an empathetic commitment to solving their customers’ problems. In other words, they have a sense of purpose and meaning. In such product teams, the members act and feel like a startup’s founders within the larger organization. A weak product team, on the other hand, delivers on whatever it’s told to build.

2. Varied skill sets and expertise

A successful product team will entail several members with distinct skill sets. Typical product teams are comprised of a product manager, a product designer, and several engineers (or developers). Depending on the product scope and the organization's size, the engineering (or development) team could include technical leads, senior and junior developers, and QA or test automation experts. Furthermore, a product team might have other members including product marketing managers, user researchers, data analysts, and a project or delivery manager (or scrum master).

3. Empowered and held accountable

Strong product teams exist to solve complex problems with clear objectives and autonomy in delivering on those objectives. Such teams are empowered to find the best solutions and are held accountable for delivering results.

4. Nimble and focused

Successful product teams have lower and upper bounds. Generally, the minimum size of a product team is four with one product manager, one designer, and two engineers. The upper bound for the number of engineers on a product team is between 8–12 engineers. This is to help the team keep focus and agility.

5. Flat hierarchy

Successful product teams are intentionally flat organizations and are not about reporting relationships or hierarchies. Most often, product team members are individual contributors who typically continue to report to their functional manager (such as Engineering, Marketing, Design, or Product). And the product manager, despite being held accountable for most business-related ROIs, is not the manager of anyone on the product team.

6. Collaboration

Successful product teams are highly skilled colleagues who collaborate on building solutions to hard problems. In essence, the nature of a product team member’s relationship is about true collaboration than individual egos.

7. Preferably co-located

Successful product team members need to sit close to one another so that they can see each other’s computer screens. While acknowledging the impact of COVID and the improvement in digital communication technologies, to build a sense of meaning and purpose, physical proximity creates social bonds and dynamism among team members when the team sits together, eats lunch together, and builds personal relationships. Furthermore, depending on the importance of the product and its value proposition, actual employees are preferred over contractors or agencies as stability in employment status will create a sense of empathy with the problem the team is addressing.

8. Manageable scope of work

Depending on the size of the organization, a successful product team’s type and scope of work should be according to its capacity. Therefore it’s important to correctly slice up work by customer or user type, device, geography, and/or technology architecture. While there is never an optimal way to split the scope of work, it should be done to minimize costs and pains for all team members.

9. Longevity and durability

Successful product teams have a long-term vision and high retention rates. Meaningful innovation, especially in established and competitive market environments, does not come too often and it requires team members to work on a long-term project to move the needle. People will find it difficult to gain the necessary skills, sense of ownership, and empathy for their product if they frequently switch teams or have colleagues leaving the organization so often.

10. ‘Balanced’ autonomy

For a successful product team to have passion and an empathetic drive for solving customer problems, it needs autonomy. This doesn’t mean that it needs to be left alone to work on ‘cool stuff’, but that it aims to find solutions in the best way they see fit because they have the skill sets and are trusted experts on the matter. This requires minimizing dependencies to the extent possible considering the scale of the organization and product scope.

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