Tips for Growing a Product Management Team
Growth is something wonderful: It means that individuals, teams, and products prosper. Growing a product management team, however, throws up a number of challenges: How big should the team become? How fast should people be added? And how should the individuals work together? This articles discusses how you can address these challenges and it shares my recommendations for growing in an effective manner.
Organise Around Products
In order to grow your product management team, start by reviewing your product portfolio. Determine which assets are actual products — value creating vehicles that offer a tangible benefit or address a real problem for a group of people, while at the same time deliver specific business benefits, such as generating revenue directly or indirectly, reducing cost, or increasing brand equity.
Once you’ve identified the products, determine the skills required to manage each asset. For example, an internal product like a platform is likely to require in-depth technical skills — unlike an end-user facing offering, which is likely to require a thorough understanding of the market and business model, for example.
Then look for the right individual to lead and manage each product bearing in mind that the person should look after the asset over an extended period of time. This rewards long-term thinking and helps people see which impact their decisions have.
Determine How Many People are Needed
Once you have identified your products together with the skills required to manage them, find out how many product people you need. A common way to do this is to determine the number of development teams needed to progress each asset: If a product needs more than two to three teams, then it is usually too large for one person to manage in my experience.
If that’s the case for one of your products, consider adding more product people who take on specialised roles like feature owner (a.k.a. area product owner in LESS) and work with the person in charge of the overall product.
Develop Shared Standards
Before you add more people, make sure that sufficient shared standards are in place. Review the product management roles and responsibilities, processes, and tools that are currently used. Explore if they are helpful, consistent, and complete. For instance, do you have a shared understanding of how ideas are progressed to shippable products — be it new offerings or new features? Do common product discovery and strategy practices exist? And do you agree on what a product vision, strategy, roadmap, and backlog are, for example, and how these plans should be captured?
Finally, review how the work of the product people is currently assessed. What are performance evaluations based on? And are they fair? For instance, you may want to tie the evaluations not only to the performance of the product an individual looks after; you may also want to consider the person’s ability to effectively lead and collaborate with dev teams and stakeholders, as well as improve their work and acquire new skills.
If important standards are missing, then develop them first and delay growing the team: Without effective standards, it will be difficult for a larger group of people to work together. Confusion, miscommunication, and other forms of waste are likely to materialise. This is not to say that any standard should be set in stone. The opposite is true: Standards exist to help people do great work in a healthy manner. If a standard can be improved, the people doing the work should be empowered to change it.
Read On …
To read the rest of this article and access the remaining tips, please head over to my website: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/tips-for-growing-a-product-management-team/
Learn More
To learn more about this topic, attend my Product Leadership training course and read my book Strategize.
Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/tips-for-growing-a-product-management-team/
