Structuring Product Teams

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Curated Learning Resources

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  Factors in Structuring a Product Organization

  Marty Cagan, Partner, Silicon Valley Product Group

  Marty discusses important factors to consider when structuring a product organization. The top priority is ensuring each product team has clear ownership over their area to feel empowered. It is also important to align the product structure with users, development teams, Software Architecture, and business units, though aligning with users first is advocated. The optimal product team structure changes over time, so revisiting it annually makes sense. Larger organizations commonly have teams providing common services which are among the most difficult due to dependencies. In the end, any product structure involves tradeoffs between optimizing for some things over others.

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  Don’t Ship the Org Chart, Part 1

  Ken Norton, Partner, GV, Google

  Ken discusses how to best organize product management teams as startups grow. He recommends not dividing teams based on engineering code bases like front-end vs back-end, but rather by customer experience, such as buyer vs seller experiences. Organizing teams this way allows each PM to fully own an end-to-end customer experience. He also notes that when envisioning new features, fewer PMs should need to be involved in decisions if the teams are experience-based rather than code-based. Additionally, he stresses that any Organizational Structure will need to change over time as the company and product evolve.

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  Restructuring The Braze Product Team

  Kevin Wang, VP Product, Braze

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  Why you Should Organize Product Teams Around Customer Experiences

  Panagiotis Goros, Product Director, Upstream

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  This VP is Doing Things Differently in the Product Org — Here’s His Playbook

  Tyler Hogge, VP of Product & Strategy, Divvy

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  Establishing a Product Organization Structure

  Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, Head of Product, 8fit

  Jens-Fabian discusses how product organizations should structure their teams as the company grows. In startups with just a few people, little formal structure is needed as coordination is easy. However, as the number of employees increases, more structure is required so people are not overwhelmed managing relationships. Without subteams, a 100-person company would result in nearly 5,000 individual relationships to coordinate. Therefore, larger product organizations need defined substructures and teams so employees can focus on their work instead of communication. The Organizational Structure determines who works together on what aspects of product development.

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