The Structure and Roles of a Product Team

Have you ever thought about how a product team is composed? When the need to create a digital solution arises, be it an app or a platform , many people immediately think about hiring a programmer. But is that where it all starts? Are there other professionals essential in the construction of digital products? What are the priorities that should be considered when structuring this team? In this article, the first in a series on teams working with digital products, we will explore the roles and expertise needed in a product team. This way, you will be able to choose the best structure according to your demand.

Anti-patterns

In IT, anti-pattern is the practice that, despite being commonly used, is inefficient or counter-productive. In this sense, we will analyze some of the most common mistakes when assembling product teams.

• There is no “I” in “team”: a digital product is not a one-person effort. Since 1986, it is already established that the creation of products requires a multidisciplinary team, capable of contributing to the product with the various necessary visions: business, user, technology, etc. Even in an early-stage startup, where the team certainly needs to be lean, relying on one person alone to solve the entire digital product is usually a bad decision, with a negative impact on the result, on the time-to-market, and in the worst case, even the retention of knowledge.
• Silos or teams? If you work at a mature company, another concern is breaking down silos. A team requires a group of people working together. It is not possible to keep people in separate departments (the quality department, the design department, etc.) and transfer demands between them. This type of pattern generates additional hand-off effort (transfer of the task between departments) and breaks the collaboration that is necessary to deal with the complexity of a digital product.
• Working for Jobs: Another anti-pattern is to hire the necessary people, but not let them dedicate themselves to the product, dividing their attention between multiple jobs or different contexts. Those who work like this will not devote the necessary attention to delving into the context of the product, in addition to losing productivity. The best thing is to have a dedicated team. Are some divisions possible? Yes, and we will mention some of them below. However, if a person can’t even tell what product they’re working on, something’s wrong!

Thinking about how the team is structured is an important point. The design of the organization has an impact on the results because it helps to clarify responsibilities, expectations, and even the level of autonomy. This subject is so important that there is already an area of study focused on team structuring to achieve better results. According to Raphael Rodrigues, Agile Manager at SoftDesign, it is essential to think about the team structure based on the individual skills of those involved and how they can complement each other, as this directly affects team size, costs, and hand-off. “This is a high-risk factor if it is done by someone who does not understand the process of building digital products”, he warns. So as not to start from scratch, then, one possibility is to study some existing models to inspire us when creating product teams. Such models are the result of processes or known cases of famous companies. The most common model today is the one suggested by Scrum. In this framework, the roles in a product team are Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Developers. It is important to mention that these are roles, not positions. Ultimately, a programmer could also assume the role of Scrum Master. The Product Owner can be someone from the business, who actively participates with the team. Finally, the Developers are all the people needed to get the work done, including Programmers, Designers, Quality Engineers, etc. If we follow Scrum’s suggestions, our teams will consist of ten or fewer people, as this size favors communication, collaboration, and productivity. In the Spotify model, the teams are larger and have six to twelve people. Some agilists use the seven-person rule, accepting a variation of two plus or minus. Then there is also the pizza rule used by Jeff Bezos at Amazon: your team must have a size that you can fill by ordering two pizzas!

Scaling the Product Team

Not all your demand for digital products will be solved by seven people or with two pizzas! As a startup grows, or a traditional company digitally transforms, it will need multiple teams. Marty Cagan, in the book Inspired, suggests that a startup, after placing a first MVP on the market, when it is still looking for market-fit, will have between one and four teams, and a maximum of 25 programmers. On the other hand, in the famous unicorn startups, it is possible to get to hundreds of teams. Most companies, however, will find their product plateaus without such a large scale and stabilize with a dozen teams. Here we have the models that try to help us scale this structure in an organized way, such as the LeSS and Safe models. Another model that became very famous and influenced many people is the Spotify example, which we discussed earlier. In this model, the focus is on structuring an organization with many teams, but still ensuring agility and autonomy so that teams can deliver results without suffering from paralyzing dependencies, or losing connection and creating a Frankenstein monster. From Spotify, what became famous was the nomenclature, which you may have already heard: Squads, Tribes, Chapters, and Guilds. However, the coolest thing about this model is being inspired by the practical ways they found to manage knowledge between teams.

Assembling My First Product Team

If you are assembling a team or starting to think about assembling one, check out the list we made with the skills and profiles that we at SoftDesign understand are necessary to build a digital product these days. Let’s start with the core, the basics of this product team:

• Product – a key role, which is responsible for structuring the product vision and strategy, planning roadmap, and translating user and market needs to the team. The more this person is connected with strategic decisions, and knows the product’s investment thesis, the better!
• Design – a role that cannot be dismissed these days, when users are increasingly demanding with the product experience and it is so easy to choose similar products. This profile is responsible for knowing the user, their habits, and needs, and with this data, to propose an experience that seeks usability, engagement, and enchantment.
• Programming – is the people who will write the product code, in addition to configuring the environment and infrastructure, and automating processes and tests. A product team always has more than one person in this role. The types of programmers you will need will depend on the product. Maybe you will need Front-End Programmers (specialists in the construction of screens and interfaces); Back-End Programmers (specialists in building business rules, integration services, and databases); Mobile Programmers (specialized in building applications) or even more specific cases, such as programmers specialized in Big Data, ETL, Blockchain, IoT, etc.
• Quality and testing – this is a profile that has evolved a lot in recent years, and which, in general, requires knowledge to plan tests (think about the risks of the product and what needs to be verified), perform manual functional tests, automate tests (write test codes) and also perform other types of non-functional tests, such as load and performance.

Going a little beyond the basics:

• Agilist, Scrum Master – the team will need someone to help adopt a work process/method and get organized. Generally, this role is also concerned with ensuring that the productivity and deliverability of the team are stable and in constant improvement, because, at the end of the day, this is the only thing that guarantees predictability for the business, generating the necessary data to plan a roadmap. It is worth mentioning that it is common for agilists to be in more than one team at the same time.
• Infrastructure Architects – these are roles that probably don’t need to be 100% dedicated. Still, the team needs to have access to people with the experience and knowledge necessary to define an architecture and technology stack and to validate or configure the infrastructure necessary for the product to run in its production environment. These people bring a vision of thinking about product continuity, performance, capability, and security.
• Product Marketing Person – here a whole new universe opens up! If your product has customers, you need to think about how to get it to the market. How to position and advertise? How do I find and attract customers? For all this, there is a professional profile focused on product marketing.

Ready and Qualified Product Teams

Assembling a digital product team is not an easy task. It is necessary to choose the ideal structure that reinforces the desired behaviors, find a group of people who have the necessary skills and who have a good experience, and still do all this in a hot market, where there is a shortage of professionals in relation to the growing number of vacancies. That’s why SoftDesign is concerned with building a work environment that helps us attract, train and retain great professionals, with whom we set up product development teams to serve our customers. In addition, we continually invest in knowledge and in the adoption of cutting-edge technologies and methods, which keeps our collaborators motivated to build innovative products together with our customers. If you need to build a digital solution and your team is not complete, you can count on our Outsourcing service. Now, if you don’t have a team yet, and want to have an experienced team, integrated and ready to start, you count on our Software Development service. Contact us using the form below to discuss your needs.