Building the Product Team
I’m currently on the process of laying the foundation for the product management team. Of course, big titles and hiring 200 people at once is not in my line of sight. However, I wanted to write some notes on how I feel you can build things effectively, while maintaining something that’s always important to an organization: subject matter experts.
While PM’s cover a wide breadth of things in the organization, they are not the be all and end all. Ever. They do interact with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Legal, etc…. but it should be in a product centric way, at least in my opinion.
I don’t really agree with the Product Management triad for building a team effectively. Especially in multi-product portfolios. I could see it working well for 1-3 product companies, but not when you have 8-11 products you’re managing. It just puts too much on an individuals plate.
I’m proceeding down a path that will break product responsibility up in to management chunks, especially since our products are not all overly complex with a ton of functionality. So, for example, if you have 3 major product groups, the first step (at least for me) is to hire in a PM that compliments those three areas:
- Product Manager, Group 1
- Product Manager, Group 2
- Product Manager, Group 3
I’m also a big fan of having a group of matrix’d Product Analysts / Associate Product Managers. The PM’s for each product then share those PA’s to write requirements for specific features, help with competitive analysis, market research, etc… The PA’s than get the benefit of working with several PM’s and seeing how they do things. In addition, they exposed to the entire product line - they become very valuable for helping Sales, Marketing, going to trade shows, training customers, etc….
In addition to the product management team, one thing I have discovered is that Quality Assurance really does serve in a front-line, cross-functional role. Having that group under product management really helps out. It provides them with a venue for extracting requirements from users or during a release cycle for continuous product improvements. Support / Client Services works in the same way.
So, you have product managers owning each major group as a first step, and matrix’d QA and product analysts as a second step. Of course, you need to have the product leader overseeing the entire group. This would be referred to as the Director or Product Strategy in the pragmatic triad, or Director / VP of Product Management.
This organizational foundation opens things up for some solid growth. You can then place Senior PM’s in the group, and have 1:1 relationships with PM’s running individual products as they grow and mature. You continue to build the product analyst team, and developing them so you can hire / promote from within. It’s inevitably easier, and the team starts to foster growth and folks who want to excel in order to get promoted into open PM slots.
There are probably lots of folks that would disagree with this structure, but it’s rigidly flexible. So long as the product leader has a framework in place to manage products, it offers the PM’s that own groups / individual products to manage them in any way they see fit, within the boundaries of continuing to provide development and other functional groups materials they expect to get in order to work with effectively.
October 1st, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I like the concept, especially that it encourages promotion and grooming from within. Too often I have seen a company loose a PM, and not have anyone who is capable or wants to fill the position from within.