🚀 EVO18: Delivery or Feature or Product Team?
Product Evolution is about helping Product professionals, Product teams, Product organizations and the products they develop to level up.
tl;dr
Useful distinction between various types of product development teams, made by Marty Cagan (author of Inspired and Empowered). What kind of product development team are you working on?
Some of my notes:
Transitioning from ‘delivery’ teams to ‘feature’ teams is done by adding cross-functionality and embedding roles like UX Designer and Product Manager in the team.
It’s mainly an org. design challenge - how is the organization designed to better pursue the business strategy and create value?
Transitioning from ‘feature’ teams to ‘product’ teams is done by adding an outcome focus and empowering the team to come up with solutions that make the product progress towards the desired user, customer and business outcomes.
Both outcome focus and team empowerment are linked to the organizational culture and mindsets existing in the wider organization.
A particular point in this transition is linked to the leadership model (how people lead other people and initiatives) and the management model (how people manage various assets and flows) in the organization.
Teams are not islands in the organization, so they are connected to the culture, leadership and management in the wider organization.
Given the above, it’s unlikely that a team evolves by itself from a delivery team to a feature team to a product team, while the rest of the organization:
Doesn’t value cross-functionality at team level, but prefers that each function is separated (through separate objectives, even separate work space) from other functions;
Doesn’t understand the distinctions between outcomes and outputs, or doesn’t put into practice a real focus on outcomes;
Doesn’t empower people at team level to use their capabilities and collaboration to achieve the outcomes needed;
At the same time, the reverse transitions are always possible:
‘Product’ teams losing an outcome focus and starting focusing on outputs (e.g. features and bugs) might transition to becoming ‘feature’ teams, even though they are empowered at their level;
‘Product’ teams losing empowerment and receiving top down mandates to build feature X, for example, might transition to becoming ‘feature’ teams, even though they continue understanding and using outcomes at their level;
‘Feature’ teams losing cross-functionality, like when the current UX Designer leaves and the Product Manager becomes only a Product Owner, might transition to becoming a ‘delivery’ team, in Marty Cagan’s definition.
Closing thoughts
While keeping in mind that this is just a model for describing product development teams, a simplification of the reality, it might be useful to have a discussion with your Product leadership team (e.g Director of Product, Director of Engineering, UX Director) about how are you creating the 3 conditions mentioned by Cagan:
Cross-functionality and effective collaboration between functions, at team level;
Clarity on desired outcomes and links between these outcomes and strategy;
Autonomy and empowerment for using team capabilities and collaboration to achieve desired outcomes, without major interventions from outside the Product team.
As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with better strategic thinking - which usually translates to:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.