Episode 12: Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Strategic Team Building
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about the design and strategy in organizing and building strong product teams.
Have a product question for Melissa? Submit one here and Melissa may answer it in a future episode.
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Q: Is dividing teams to generate results in different strategies a wise decision? If so, how should they communicate with each other? If not, what is the right way to organize teams? [00:47]
A: I have seen some teams organize this way, which is goal-oriented organization, but I don’t believe it’s the best strategy. It’s really tricky, however if you are a really small team you could probably [make it work]. I’m more of a fan of organizing by jobs-to-be-done or value streams, which we’ll get into in the next question. [1:22]
Q: Are there any best practices in organizing digital products, future teams, and squads? How do you coordinate a backlog of all the products that are connected in an ecosystem of digital products? [4:53]
A: With this, you have to think about jobs-to-be-done and platforms. When you organize by jobs-to-be-done, what you're basically doing is looking across all of these products that solve problems for multiple personas and multiple applications and figuring out what is the job-to-be-done here. The hard part is integrating that job-to-be-done back into all the products so that it feels like one consistent experience. This is where platforms come in; you have to have a team that looks at every application you have on your ecosystem and say ‘Where do we duplicate the jobs-to-be-done? How do we pull that off and treat that like a platform?’ [5:19]
Q: How do you rightsize your product teams and value streams when the typical software system can be huge with small components? [9:41]
A: Some of this is trial and error but I do think there are some principles that we can put into play. We want to bring our product managers up so that they can oversee, again, a job-to-be-done enough to be able to build a strategy around it. So when you've got something like Microsoft Word, Gmail and Zoom, you can start to break them down into different parts and different major features in each value stream, and as complexity increases your team size will need to increase. I would start by thinking, ‘Let's look at all the components and all the things that solve a job for our customers.’ [10:04]
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