How do you structure your product org and why have you chosen that structure?

  • 24 February 2022
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scott.baldwin
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I get, and see, a lot of questions from other folks in product around how others have structured their product teams. Curious how your team is organized. What roles have you added/changed as your organization changed and grew? What resources have inspired some of your thinking on this topic?

A few resources I’ve enjoyed:

Head of Community & Product Evangelism

9 replies

Samkay
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We recently adopted a tailored version of Spotify’s squad/tribe model - which they ended up abandoning. I am a bit concerned about pigeon holing people in one area especially when you think about the engineers who are part of those squads.

 

At Railz we have a squad for all web product (Platform & Connectivity Squad), another for API & Integrations (Core Squad) and Developer Experience Squad (SDK, Libraries, Environments etc.)

 

Curious to see if anyone else is organized around tribes/squads and what that looks like :) 

Sam K
scott.baldwin
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@Samkay we’re also tribe and team based here at Productboard largely organized around our main product areas - Insights, Prioritization & Roadmaps, Collaboration, Growth, Platform, etc.

It’s interesting, as you noted, that Spotify doesn’t work this way anymore yet so many product teams do. I like the model as it helps provide focus across a clear mission. 

Head of Community & Product Evangelism
Samkay
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yeah i like it too. we have seen major improvement on our end

Sam K
Samkay
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Good morning product makers :) 

 

I am curious how your product teams are staffed. One of the things we’re starting to notice is that the product owner tasks are dominating a lot of the PMs work (story writing, sprint ceremonies etc.). I am a strong believer that these roles should be split as the org grows but curious what you’re doing in your org. For context, our product is a technical one and requires a lot of integration research. What I have seen in the past as alt options:

  • Enable the eng leaders on the squad to have a bigger role in grooming and story definitions from technical perspective
  • Hire BAs to support PMs or split PM vs PO roles in the org

Curious to know more what you do in your org. Curious also how productboard manages this @scott.baldwin 

Sam K
dkirsten
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We are currently trying to find our way of organizing the different processes. For the core PO activities we have two dedicated POs.

The overall product management is done by the two POs and me (CTO), but parts of the activity is split apart to an interdisciplinary team called RPS.

The “Roadmap Planning Squad” is responsible for the roadmap management. We are trying to make a different approach here, the team combines members from the product, customer care, sales and marketing teams. We meet regularly and decide which customer insights need to be generated and we do RICE scorings together and talk about final roadmap decisions.

We are still starting on this so I’ll keep you updated on how this works for us.

michelle.fifis
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I love the idea of a “Roadmap Planning Squad” @dkirsten. Thanks for sharing this with the community!

Michelle Fifis
scott.baldwin
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@Samkay our product teams handle all this between the PM and engineering lead and determine how they want to work. We don’t have POs. 

Head of Community & Product Evangelism
Nandap
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Hi Product Makers, does anyone organize their product teams around jobs-to-be-done? Curious to know more about it - in case you can share your experience.

JeannetteC
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@dkirsten Hi - just reading your post from a few months ago.

I liked your idea about the Roadmap Planning Squad and wondered how it’s working out ?

What’s working well ? What’s not working ?

My challenge at the moment is to get everyone to agree on what we should we working on and to stop changing priority so often !

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