Do you know about the secret ingredient for developing a successful product? It is an efficient, creative, and transparent product team. Now, how can a business build product value in the eyes of consumers? It requires an entire team’s efforts to work closely with the end user to shape both visibility and usability of the product. It’s your product team who needs to decide how the product can solve the challenges faced by the customers. From Ideation to product launching, its product team does the most crucial work to grow the organization.
Here in this blog, we’re going to discuss some fructuous pointers that will help your business to run a product team systematically.
Coming Together is the Beginning. Keeping Together is Progress. Working Together is Success. – Henry Ford
How to decide to structure your product team?
Structuring your team is the foremost step towards the success of your product. With a little bit of structure, some mentorship, and a dash of communication, you can take your product team on the right track to level up its game. After all, your team will define your organization’s success.
High-performing product team requires introducing more variety of team members with different skill sets, educational backgrounds, and experience in their respective fields.
3 ways to structure an effective Product Team
1. One Manager per Product: This is a straightforward method, where you appoint a product manager for each product. The manager is then accountable for producing and developing the strategy as per the specification of the product.
2. A Product Manager’s responsibilities are decided based on their skill: A manager may not be a master of all trades. He may have a good knowledge and experience in market research. Therefore, instead of making him responsible for a single product, you can allow him to do market research for different products or features. This will increase his productivity as he will be doing what he likes the most. This structure will require you to hire more product design managers who are experts in their domain.
3. Product Manager works with a cross-functional team: In this type of product team structure, a team is usually small and consists of developers and a product owner. The team works as an autonomous squad, implying it can release the code directly to the live product without asking for approval from any higher authority.
One famous example of this model is Amazon’s two-pizza team structure. According to this, a team should be big enough that it can be easily fed by two pizzas if they gather for a meeting. However, at Amazon, these teams do not work autonomously and need permission from their superior authority to release any updates.
How to align your product team for a common objective?
To begin with this phase, look for the sign that your team’s communication isn’t working –
A product team usually has various team members who work in synchronization to achieve one goal. But before they start working they must have clarity on the entire process to push towards a common goal. A project manager has to perform this difficult task because of the chaos in the team.
Additionally, the product manager has to make sure that the team is not only aligned vertically but also horizontally. He can achieve this dual alignment by adopting these techniques:
a. Clear Vision and Strategy: This is the founding stone of your whole product team. You and your entire team must be clear about what you are going to build and how you will build it.
b. Objective and Key Results: To improve the overall efficiency of the team it is very much required that your team members must have a clear understanding of individual goals. They also need to have complete transparency in their work. Your team must be structured properly.
c. Weekly Progress Updates: Monitoring your work is more important than just working. Therefore your team must draft a weekly progress report. This progress report will help you to monitor whether they are working in the direction of meeting the objective or not.
d. Meeting: You need to organize more productive meetings with your team members where you share weekly reviews on the product, monitor the progress, and develop a strategy for the future.
e. Roadmap: Roadmaps are very important, you must have a clear roadmap for the next 2-3 quarters. As it helps your team to align themself to fulfill a common objective.
Few Tips to structure your product team
- Your team must be small where each individual understands their responsibility.
- Focus on creating cross-functional collaboration.
- Focus on the building process which keeps costumes on priority.
- Try to build strong bonding with different departments.
Best practices to manage your product team
1. Get Better at Continuous Discovery: The first step in developing an efficient product team is to understand your product in a better way. This can be achieved either by investigating your competitors or doing product discovery.
2. Become an Expert in Product Analytics: To make fantastic product strategies, a product manager has to analyze lots of data. Therefore, your team must consist of people having great analytical skills.
3. Go for a Cross-Functional Team: Never just rely on a single member to get your job done. Because a one-person team has limited creativity and lacks ideas. Therefore your team must have representation from various departments.
Always remember a diverse opinion encourages new ways of thinking.
4. Proper Training: Upgrading and learning new skills is something that cannot be ignored by the Product Team and Manager. Every day new products and tools are introduced to the market to simplify our work. Therefore, you must encourage your team to undergo various training sessions on market trends to acquire new skills.
Promote Meaningful Relationships: Building meaningful relationships within your product team is very important. This promotes team spirit and thereby increases problem-solving skills. It also boosts productivity and improves problem-solving skills.
Wrap up
Like any agile company, whose objective is not to manufacture the right product in the first go, but to understand the demand of their customers and methods of improving the existing products – always proves valuable. The same goes for you as well. You don’t have to build the best product management team on the first attempt. Rather, you must be ready for changes that will come along your evolution journey. Always make a thumb rule if it works then it’s okay, otherwise, the next approach will be better.
About Us: Algoworks is a B2B IT firm providing end-to-end product development services. Operating chiefly from its California office, Algoworks is reputed for its partnership with Fortune 500 companies such as Amazon, Dell, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Algoworks is an expert in UI/UX Designs with experience catering to enterprises belonging to all domains. This includes: Brand Strategy, Product Design, UX Research, UI & Animation and Design Testing. For more information, contact us here.
Nauman Ahmad
