Product Development Team Structure

All product teams grow similarly in the Hollywood version of the IT industry. It begins with a small group of intelligent, quirky entrepreneurs working out of a garage, stressing over every aspect of their game-changing invention. The product quickly takes off, and boom! The firm relocates to a dazzling campus manned by swarms of developers, all working tirelessly on their modest portion of the grand design. In reality, though, things are not that simple.

Creating a well-oiled product team to manage development and maintenance is critical to creating a successful digital product. Product teams are mobile and adaptive, which aids in making the most of a digital product. One of the essential things a firm can do is to build a product team. The team is responsible for creating, developing, and launching products. 

Many businesses struggle to properly arrange their product teams to boost productivity and optimize teams. One of the most critical parts of this process is organizational product structure. 

The product manager ensures that a product surpasses – and remains ahead of – customer expectations. They must be in charge of backlog prioritization, development, implementation, and obtaining stakeholder approval, among other duties!

Thinking big, understanding good design, avoiding overcommitment, reviewing customer requests and knowing when to prioritize them, knowing when and how to say no, effective communication and negotiation skills, product storytelling, writing compelling copy, monitoring important metrics, reviewing bugs, and working with many different teams are all challenges. Product managers must establish, lead, and manage a competent product team and accomplish all these daily tasks. This is done not just to assure the product’s success but also for the firm as a whole. Having a well-structured product team with individuals that have diverse skill sets may have a significant influence on the bottom line.

What makes the product development team?

Representatives from five departments are often included in the core product team: innovation, product management, project management, product marketing, and engineering. While the unit controls the product’s direction jointly, team members may not always report to the same command or department. Of course, the particular mix and structure will vary based on the company’s kind and maturity, your unique offers, release frequency, and any methodology you use.

Collaboration is essential. Building a product that delights consumers at every stage of the customer experience needs clear ownership and a thorough grasp of each function on the product team. Whatever products or services you are in charge of, providing a Complete Product Experience is what counts in the end. You may make smarter product choices and provide a fantastic user experience by combining multiple views and comprehensive knowledge of every consumer touchpoint.

Let’s dive deep into their roles and responsibilities – 

Innovation – 

Innovation has become a priority for both corporate and public sector organizations. When done correctly, it may result in superior products. Innovators pay attention to how processes and people interact, what consumers want and need, and how the organization delivers those requirements. These innovators deeply understand the significant client needs and consider other approaches to enhance the experience.

For successful innovation to benefit the organization, the three steps of idea creation, idea conversion, and idea diffusion must be efficiently managed, which is where the product manager comes in. The product manager is responsible for ensuring that there are no gaps in the innovation value chain, which is represented by these three phases. As a result, the product manager’s responsibility is to ensure that the complete chain is robust since every chain is only as strong as its weakest link. First, during the idea generation stage, the focus should be on creating ideas from multiple sources, including inside business units, across the firm, and even from consumers and end users. The idea conversion stage is the step in which the lists of new ideas created must be assessed for economic feasibility and the kind of business they bring to the firm. The concept conversion stage is also the step at which the produced ideas must be validated for technical feasibility and whether the organization has the resources and bandwidth to move the ideas to the next level, and then to the product development phase. Finally, the idea dissemination stage is when the ideas that have been sourced must be validated, financed, and permissions obtained from different internal and external stakeholders. Because the idea dissemination stage marks the end point of the concept stage, the product manager must ensure that all of these phases operate together in a single coherent link to reduce friction between the different components in the chain.

Innovation :

Responsibilities	Owners
– Create a procedure for collecting and evaluating feedback from consumers, team members, and stakeholders. – Identify and prioritize business transformation opportunities. – Set and monitor innovation KPIs, such as new customers or ideas submitted.	– Chief innovation officer (CINO) – Chief digital officer (CDO) – Director of the strategy – Director of innovation – Research and development (R&D) director

Product management and UX – 

Product management is essential for providing breakthroughs and propelling corporate success. It is a vital organizational job that is gaining prominence. Product management is a cross-functional job that requires cross-functional interactions with organizational stakeholders such as C-level executives and marketing and sales departments. Product managers are responsible for both internal and external product management. Internal product management includes doing market research, competitive intelligence, and industry trends, as well as developing strategy and maintaining the product roadmap. External product management involves responsibility for product marketing such as message and branding, customer communication, new product releases, advertising, public relations, and events.

User experience (UX) is the discipline of developing products that fulfill the demands of users and that consumers can navigate simply and intuitively to get value rapidly. User experience refers to how a user interacts with a product. UX design considers not just how a platform looks and feels, but also how it functions. It encompasses both visible and touchable aspects, such as the layout of a website or the design of an app’s buttons, features, and icons, as well as non-visual elements, such as the logic underlying the interface, button placement, and so on. UX designers are in charge of establishing which features are most essential to users, how they should interact with one another, and which ones should be highlighted. The importance of UX design cannot be overstated, not just for the end user but also for the company or brand driving the user experience. Designers must examine how to provide value to all types of people while creating these experiences.

Product management and UX :

Responsibilities	Owners
– Establish the product vision and strategy, and learn about the demands of your customers. – Perform user testing – Test new product and enhancement ideas – Make product roadmaps. – Releases must be planned and delivered. – In charge of the cross-functional product team – Create new product features. – Create product experiences	– Chief product officer (CPO) – VP of product management – Director of product management – Group product manager – Product manager – Product owner – Director of product design – UX designer – UX researcher – Product designer

Project management – 

Project management is managing a team’s effort to fulfill all project objectives within limits. This data is often specified in project documentation and prepared at the start of the development process. Project management aims to accomplish a project that meets the customer’s needs. In many circumstances, project management seeks to mold or reform the client’s brief to effectively fulfill the client’s goals.

With the adoption of agile methodologies by many product development firms, the project management sector is evolving. In recent years, project manager-led initiatives have changed to team-focused leadership, enabling knowledge workers in lean and agile transformed businesses to create products or services.

Agile project management is an iterative method to project management that focuses on continuous releases and integrating client input with each iteration. Agile project management approaches help software teams improve development pace, collaboration, and the flexibility to adjust to market changes.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a collection of organizational and workflow principles for deploying agile methods at the corporate level. The framework is a body of knowledge that contains organized instruction on roles and duties, work planning and management, and values to adhere to. SAFe encourages alignment, cooperation, and delivery across a large number of agile teams. It was built on three fundamental sets of knowledge: agile software development, lean product development, and systems thinking. SAFe offers a systematic strategy for scaling agile as enterprises increase in scale. SAFe is divided into four variants to handle different degrees of scale: Essential SAFe, Large Solution SAFe, Portfolio SAFe, and Full SAFe.

Project Management :

Responsibilities	Owners
– Projects must be completed on schedule and within budget. – Provide transparency into delivery progress. – Coordinate the activities of cross-functional teams and dependencies. – Keep track of project approvals and resources. – Streamline procedures within the company to boost efficiency.	– Chief operating officer (COO) – Director of program management – Director of project management – Program manager – Project manager

Product Marketing – 

Product marketing’s objective is to inform the world about the product or feature and the issue it solves, while product management’s mission is to construct the product or functionality that solves consumers’ problems. This refers to both current product customers and new people that we wish to bring in to utilize the product. This position is in charge of developing and executing the product’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy. 

Once a client has been acquired, SaaS firms must maintain regular communication and marketing with them in order to avoid churn. When someone churns, they’ve effectively left your funnel. Whereas a conventional business may see a transaction as “one and done,” SaaS businesses are laser-focused on long-term retention after a demo or download. That is why so many SaaS businesses employ a “freemium” model or provide a free version of their product to attract consumers. Creating a successful SaaS marketing strategy requires identifying the best strategies to attract and contact consumers. And, once again, there is no one solution. Instead, there is a mix of channels and methods that successful SaaS firms have proved to work over and again, such as email marketing, SEO, webinars, PPC, social advertisements, organic social media, and many more.

Product Marketing :

Responsibilities	Owners
– Investigate the competitive landscape. – Create buyer personas. – Create and coordinate launch strategies. – Create positioning and marketing that emphasizes the advantages of utilizing the product. – Increase product awareness and use	– Director of product marketing – Senior product marketing manager – Solutions marketing manager – Portfolio marketing manager – Content Writer – Copywriter – Digital Marketer

Engineering – 

An engineering team is a group of developers and managers who are in charge of the actual creation and construction of a specific product or service. They are in charge of running all sprints and developing new or essential features, upgrades, and repairs. The engineering team builds and/or maintains most of what the consumer uses and experiences with the finished product. Product-oriented engineering teams are responsible for more than simply writing code. They consider the big picture to determine the worth and influence of what they’re doing. They converse with consumers. They also systematically study and monitor the performance of features to identify areas for improvement. There are numerous crucial elements to consider while assembling your own technical team. What responsibilities will you require? Which team structure is ideal for your company? The answers to these questions will be determined by what will best assist your team’s effectiveness. However, as with many sectors, IT organizations have radically varied demands, therefore engineering jobs and titles will vary from one to the next. 

Distinct engineering structures have different advantages and disadvantages. Some prefer technical expertise and a waterfall approach to production, whilst others value a cross-functional team and agile production frameworks like Scrum.

Engineering :

Responsibilities	Owners
– Create apps and features. – On-time delivery of functioning code – Create a strong architecture to support the product’s aims. – Integrate the product into the continuous integration and delivery pipelines to iterate fast.	– Chief technology officer (CTO) – Director of software development – Engineering manager Software developer – User experience (UX) designer – User interface (UI) designer – Quality assurance (QA) tester

QA Team – 

Product testing is not only necessary for identifying and correcting mistakes and malfunctions, but it also guarantees that the development process is well-planned and efficient. The only method to detect faults and problems in software products and ensure a successful and dependable product launch is to conduct effective software product testing. QA professionals are involved in all stages of the product life cycle. From the commencement of product creation until the support phase, they examine the functionality for compliance with technical and business criteria. They make certain that the product addresses certain business challenges as effectively as feasible. The purpose of Quality Assurance is to enhance the development and testing processes and, as a result, to eliminate defects. Setting up a good quality management system, examining its viability, and reviewing all associated activities are all part of the Quality Assurance strategy. The Quality Assurance engineer examines product requirements and chooses tools for human and automated testing, as well as maintaining documentation. QA should be well-versed in several tools in order to identify the most suited one for the product’s objectives and demands. For QA in product development, a variety of models are used, including the Waterfall Model, Agile Test Framework, Rapid Action Model, and V Model.

QA Team :

Responsibilities

Owners

– It guarantees the software product’s predictability and dependability. – It handles product bugs by upgrading packages to remove bugs and glitches in the system. – Technically, quality analysis ensures documentation rules and testing in the product development environment. This aids in system-level testing, environmental testing, functional testing and other software testing needs. – QA provides preventative steps to limit the likelihood of mistakes and faults. This is followed by remedial steps for the faults. – Along with all of the other duties, quality analysis aids in the development of quality procedures that connect with the company’s key measurements. These efforts result in a high-quality product and a satisfied consumer.

– Manual QA Engineers – Automation QA Engineers – Technical QA Leads – Team QA Managers – Performance QA Engineers

DevOps –

DevOps essentially allows any organization to produce high-quality software products quicker while maintaining excellent team cohesiveness. DevOps, on the other hand, is more than simply a technique. It is a culture that integrates product development (Dev) with IT operations (Ops) to accelerate processes while maintaining product quality. DevOps’ primary aims are to optimize the product development lifecycle by implementing methods for automation, continuous monitoring, testing, and improvement. Successful product releases, improved product quality, shorter time to repair issues, and faster time to recover if the product crashes are additional aims. Simply said, DevOps accelerates your product development process while improving product quality.

DevOps is one of the most widely discussed software development methodologies nowadays. It is used by Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Etsy, and many more industry leaders. As a result, it is critical to consider implementing DevOps for improved performance, business success, and competitiveness.

DevOps :

Responsibilities	Owners
– Writing specification and documentation – Infrastructure management – Performance assessment and monitoring – Cloud deployment and management – CI/CD management and automation – Server configuration – Cloud Infrastructure – Microservices	– The DevOps Evangelist – The Code Release Manager – The Automation Architect – The Experience Assurance Expert (XA) – The Software Developer/Tester – The Security & Compliance Engineer

Even though various sorts of individuals have distinct responsibilities in the product team structure, getting all these people to work together defines your organization’s product culture. When you conceive of your firm as a product and your people as customers and collaborators, you’ll see an increase in staff morale and efficiency. It is now time to go deeply into the steps of establishing and growing the product team structure.

It’s a lively atmosphere where everyone may give their ideas. There aren’t too many competing viewpoints to divert attention away from what has to be done. But when it comes to growing… Scaling their teams is an almost impossible problem for product teams.

Knowing how to scale efficiently is essential in your product’s lifecycle. Here are a few pointers to share with your product development teams.

First, consider the typical growth trajectory of a startup.

Stages of Growth in the Product Development Team – 

Stage 1 – 

Typically, a founder and an idea are present from the outset. In terms of product development, the founder has a lot of say. There isn’t anybody else since there isn’t an official product yet. As the team shrinks to one or two individuals, the initial personalities will dictate which positions are required in the future.

During this stage, there is usually a lot of research and getting to know user pain issues. Everything will go toward creating your first MVP. You have a few devoted people who put their heads down and get things done. You generally don’t need to arrange yourselves into various positions at this time since everyone is working toward the same objective.

Everyone is working together to create an excellent product that people desire. That being said, it’s a good idea to start establishing these values early on to embed them in your corporate culture. In reality, designations such as “Product Owner” set expectations for cooperation and planning.

Most product structures will develop as the product expands and new team members join.

Stage 2 – 

It’s time to build your product now that you’ve hooked your first few consumers. There are more extensive business considerations, such as recognizing monetization options and constructing infrastructure to support your development as you expand.

As you go through this stage, your existing team structure will influence how quickly or slowly you can roll out new features. Depending on the size of your firm, you may just need one person to work on early-stage research and get people enthusiastic about impending releases. Assume, however, that you are developing faster than predicted. In such instances, simply one developer may be unable to keep up with everything being designed for clients: all these responsibilities are required to keep the development cycle running smoothly.

Separate product managers/owners/analysts working on various phases of development is an efficient approach to scaling.

Stage 3 – 

Once a firm reaches the big leagues, it might create product teams to preserve the status quo or push for continuous innovation and growth. Assume you prefer the second approach, in which case you should consider the team structure used by Amazon, Spotify, and Hubspot. Spotify refers to these groups as “squads,” although Amazon often refers to “two-pizza” teams, referring to Jeff Bezos’ famous adage that teams should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas. Whatever you name it, in this formulation, project managers supervise small teams of developers, designers, and analysts that operate autonomously and produce swiftly with minimal management control.

The benefit of this paradigm is that product teams have more ownership and responsibility for their releases, and it helps major corporations to continue inventing without being bogged down by their bureaucracy. Product teams at Spotify and Amazon provide information and tools intended to be utilized throughout the organization. It’s the difference between having design teams for widgets and design teams for widget factories.

However, as with the other product team models we’ve explored, there’s a danger that the customer’s voice may be lost. Many SaaS firms try to emulate “the Spotify model.” Still, many are more concerned with being “feature factories” than listening to their consumers, preferring to delegate that responsibility to separate customer success teams.

The key to maintaining the customer first at scale is to employ and empower product managers you trust to reflect the customer-first value and who don’t shy away from soliciting input as one of the product manager’s fundamental tasks.

Product Development Team Structures – 

Regarding teams, it is critical to grasp their structural aspects. When it comes to product development, there is no one-size-fits-all framework. You may arrange your product development team around your organization’s many products or product lines, the functional area each section covers (whether a product feature or a customer segment), or a particular business or customer requirement. Here’s a short breakdown of some companies’ most popular ways to arrange their product teams. A product leader is active in all stages of the product development lifecycle since they often head the cross-functional product team. They are well-suited to collaborate closely with their product development colleagues to assess ideas, create release plans and scheduling, and specify precisely what should be developed.

Teams	Description
By performance metrics	Each product leader is responsible for a particular set of product objectives or key performance indicators (KPIs). They collaborate across product features to achieve better outcomes. If you have a mature product with documented KPIs that indicate value delivered for customers and the company, organizing your product team by performance measures may work effectively.
By customer journey, stage	Product managers concentrate on increasing the value of a product at a certain point of the customer journey, such as a customer’s first encounter with a development, onboarding, adoption, and continuous usage. This technique works best in firms with a broad product offering and the resources to address each customer journey phase thoroughly.
By customer segment,	Product managers are in charge of a particular group of consumers, each with its own set of wants and expectations. For example, one product manager may concentrate on commercial clients, while another works only with small and medium-sized firms. Organizing by client segment makes sense for businesses whose products serve the demands of drastically diverse markets or sectors.
Through cross-functional collaboration,	Cross-functional groups, often known as product squads, are prevalent among agile development teams through cross-functional collaboration. These teams often include a product owner or product manager, a coach or scrum master, developers, and, on occasion, quality assurance (QA) personnel. This strategy works effectively in big firms with enough product and development team members and resources to warrant the formation of several smaller teams.
By product feature,	A product leader is in charge of a particular emphasis area and talks with other product managers in the company regarding product cross-dependencies. Typically, the chief product officer maintains visibility and cohesiveness throughout the product organization. This structure is especially beneficial for businesses with complicated services.
By product,	Each product or product line is overseen by a product leader. While they only work on one product, they care about a wide variety of efforts for that product, including market research, product roadmap maintenance, customer feedback incorporation, and collaboration with the development team to construct new features and capabilities. This structure is ideal for big enterprises with various offers.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer, as there is with everything. The idea isn’t to make everything perfect immediately but to discover what your people prefer and how you can best meet their demands. It’s okay if your first (or second, or third) product team structure doesn’t work. Continue to study and iterate on your product team structure: don’t be scared to make adjustments to discover something that works better. Working in harmony should be your primary goal, regardless of method. Using collaboration tools to keep your team on the same page may make all the difference. Product owners, like the rest of the group, depend primarily on keeping the backlog updated and adequately defined.

Furthermore, having structured sprints will allow you to prepare ahead of time. So, what are you waiting for? Form your life-saving team, produce that game-changing product, and use Freshflows to make a brilliant product.  Freshflows is a Collaborative Product Management Tool for B2B SaaS Product Teams that assists you in producing great products by ideating, documenting, planning, transitioning, monitoring, and collaborating. This product management system is structured around walls and workstations to democratize product management and make it accessible to everyone, even solopreneurs.