Episode 27: Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Scaling Organizations

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about product operations, how to structure teams in an organization cross-functionally, and knowing when it’s time to scale your product.

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Q: What is the problem product operations solves? What does success look like for these teams? How should these teams be structured? Who should these teams report to? [1:08]

A: Product operations teams help product teams scale and get the information that they need to be able to work rapidly… [They’re] basically there to enable the product management team to set things like product strategy review, if they are on track to hitting their goals, if they're building the right things. And then also to help communication across the organization so that we can keep updating people about what's coming up… Success [for these teams] is all about enablement. The metrics and the success of product operations is “am I enabling the product management team to do their jobs better?” Hopefully you're creating your own systems, you're creating your own software, you're building things that work together to be able to produce these things. [1:41]
If you're just starting out with this you might just need one product operations person. If you're a smaller group stage company starting to scale, maybe you hire a director of product ops and then eventually a VP of product ops… [9:02]

Q: How do you know in advance when your product is ready to scale and how do you prepare from a roadmap funding perspective? [11:41]

A: First of all, roadmaps are living things so it's not worth it to build an entire roadmap for something that you don't know you want to scale yet… You need to test it and make sure it works, then go back and figure out what you need to do to actually scale it. Once you have that,  you go back and you say “how do I solidify it?” [13:19]

Q: Can you provide some sample product and design team organization structures that you’ve seen work well? Where do product and business analysts sit in the organization? Do designers, assuming they're part of the product management team umbrella, have assigned PMs to partner with? Do you see product directors who manage product managers as stronger in the company domain, or great PM craft practitioners? [16:38]

A: I always advocate for incredibly strong design leaders with a VP of product and VP of design, and design reports to design and product reports to product. I think if you have very strong functional leaders that work super well together you will have no problems… A very common structure that we also see is a chief product officer with a VP of product underneath them and a VP of design underneath them… When it comes to design I always always advocate to have dedicated designers sitting on cross-functional teams. Do not float your designers and make them a resource everybody has to vie for… Product and business analysts usually report to the Chief Product Officers. [17:02]

Every level of product management should be strong… your product team should be filled with product people. Many organizations take subject matter experts and make them product directors; it’s really hard to manage people when you've never done their job before… I always advocate for product leaders at every level to have a strong product management background because you're also training the rest of the teams. If you don't know how to do your job, they're not going to learn how to do their job, and that's when everybody gets frustrated. [20:44]

Resources

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter
CPOaccelerator.com
ProductInstitute.com