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How to Nail Your Product Management Team Structure

March 16, 2023

10 minute read

How to structure a product management team is one of the most common challenges facing companies as they grow. And for good reason! Product is the beating heart of any tech startup.

To find alignment between market research and engineering’s capabilities – and to build something that not only works but also feels nice to use? The product management team has a lot on its plate, and the team’s structure can be make or break.

Whether you’re a Chief Product Officer, Chief Executive Officer, or Product Manager, these are the thing you need to know to nail your product management team structure.

In this post, we’ll cover:

  • Roles on a product team
  • How to structure a product management team
  • Factors to consider when choosing a team structure
  • Pitfalls to avoid in product team structure
  • Tools that facilitate product team structure
  • How to grow a product team

Roles on a product team

Let’s begin with the types of roles that could appear on a product team. Some are essential and universal, others are more niche to specific types of products or industries – or only possible if your company has the resources to hire them. Depending on the organizational structure some people involved in product management might not be considered part of the Product team at all!

So, of course, the number and types of roles in any product organization will vary. Here we’ll cover the core and supplemental roles that are possible. Later on, we’ll discuss how to know when you need to grow the team and hire someone new!

Product Management Team Structure

Core roles within the product management team structure

1. Product Manager

The product manager (PM) wears many hats, especially in small organizations, and the scope of PM tasks looks different for every team. Essentially, the PM is focused on the entire product strategy, owning the product vision, collecting feedback, leading product discovery, and bringing vetted solutions into reality. The PM usually works across teams to get the product designed, built, and launched.

As the product team grows, these responsibilities split off to become dedicated roles filled by other product superstars.

2. Product Owner

The product owner (PO) focuses on specific tasks that might usually fall under the PM umbrella. Kind of like a project manager for a sprint, the PO grooms the product backlog before any tickets are handed to the development team. Read on about the difference between a product manager and a product owner and check out this list of product owner responsibilities.

3. Product Designer

The product designer is focused on making the product not only look good but also feel intuitive to the user. Concepts like UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) rule the designer’s world. Read on about the difference between a product manager and a product designer.

4. Engineer

The engineer role is pretty self-explanatory. But it’s important to see the engineer as a core role of the product team, and not exclusively belonging to “engineering” or “development.” The product team needs an engineer’s perspective on the feasibility and viability of any product solution!

Supplemental roles on a product team

If your team is big enough and has enough resources, and depending on your industry, you might invest in additional roles that support the core product management team.|

These roles could be:

  • Product operations. These folks are devoted to optimizing the way the product team works, through tools, data analysis, and other facilitation. Learn more about how your team could harness the power of product operations.
  • Data analyst. When SaaS analytics tools just don’t cut it anymore for a complex product, a product team might bring on their own dedicated data analyst to support product discovery and retrospectives with key performance metrics being tracked.
  • UX researcher. Since understanding and improving the user experience is central to great product management, a full-time UX researcher might come on board to support the team.
  • Growth marketer. Some of the most effective product feature changes can actually be a matter of product marketing, rather than hard code. Working hand-in-hand with a growth marketer brings a wider range of ideas and solutions to the table.
  • Legal expert, business analyst, or domain expert. These specialists especially come in handy if you’re in a highly regulated field, such as finance or medicine, or when launching in a new market.
  • Customer Success Manager, or Account Manager. Sometimes the most valuable insights don’t come from the product leaders themselves but from the external customers. Having the customer experiences brought into the product development process via your customer-facing team brings that deep understanding of the customer base to the product team via collected customer feedback focuses the product management efforts.

How to structure a product management team

Now, how do all these product roles fit together? There are many different formulations and constellations you could try to create a high-performing product team structure. Here are three popular ones that seem to work well across many types of companies.

3 ways to structure a product management team:

  1. The Product Trio
  2. Product squads
  3. Cross-functional teams

1. The Product Trio

The Product Trio includes a product person, an engineer, and a designer working together on product management as a whole, or a specific problem within the product. Each role has a hand in every step of the process. For example, the engineer takes part in customer interviews, and the PM helps with designing a solution. Product trios are mostly autonomous and self-organizing. This can be scaled based on the size of your team and products with one manager per product.

2. Product squads

Product squads are similar to product trios but are not limited to just three people from those three disciplines. For example, if a company is expanding into the German market, they might create a “Germany squad” that includes the classic product roles, plus a legal expert who knows the DACH domain. This flexibility is great depending on your product goals and product function as you can structure product team squads in a way that makes the most sense for a successful product.

Spotify made squads famous. Since then other tech companies have spoken up about the benefits of squad-led product discovery.

3. Cross-functional teams

Cross-functional teams are the traditional structure within a company where the product teams, engineering teams, and design teams are each separate arms. In this structure, each functional team can end up acting as if they’re an agency or service provider for the others – handing over what’s requested and waiting on their own requests. There is less collaboration, which can lead to siloed thinking and mismatched project planning.

Factors to consider for your product team structure

When choosing a specific structure, you might want to consider some factors related to the context of your product team and what will make the most sense for the ultimate goal of an effective product team delivering an amazing product. 

  1. The experience of current members
  2. The breadth of the product portfolio
  3. Size of overall company
  4. Change

1. Structure your team with experience in mind

The amount of product or professional experience can determine how you structure the team. If there are more senior product managers, then these seniors can be carved off into Product Trios or squads to work more autonomously. However, if the team leans more junior, you might choose a structure that provides more guidance or oversight.

2. Consider your product line

If you have a small product portfolio or specific short-term projects, you might want to structure around project (or “initiative”) teams. This teams-within-a-team, such as a single Product Trio, is focused on a particular goal or problem.

On the other hand, if you have a diverse suite of products, it might not be feasible to create separate mini-teams to manage each one. That takes a ton of resources and organization. Instead, you might choose to stay more integrated and centralized.

3. Consider the size of your company

This one seems obvious, but it’s worth saying. If you have a small company, your product team is likely also small. Structure options are pretty simple. But if you work in a large company, there might be more options and flexibility to try new team formulations. For example, with more designers and engineers in-house, the more likely you can pull one of each to form a Product Trio.

4. Change happens!

As product people, embracing change is basically our job. So, remember that teams are not fixed! Allow them to grow, flux, change, and evolve. Like your product lifecycle, your product development cycle style will change and evolve. The structure that works for you now doesn’t need to be the structure you use in a year.

Pitfalls to avoid in product team structure

The best product team structure is designed, in part, to avoid some of these product management pitfalls.

  1. Conflicting priorities. Individual teams that are working in silos, or without great communication, can end up working against each other! Structure wisely and align your teams by writing good objectives and key results.
  2. Psychologically unsafe environment. No single ego or voice should dominate the team. Everyone needs to feel they can speak up, challenge decisions and make bets.
  3. Poor meeting management. Even the best team structure can feel ineffective or annoying if meetings are: a) useless, or b) not frequent enough. Learn how to run a great product team meeting.
  4. Using the wrong tools. It’s really important to invest in the right tools for product management teams. So important that we’ve dedicated a whole section to it!

Tools to facilitate good product team structure

No structure will work well if people aren’t supported with the right tools! Designers need their design tools; developers need their engineering tools.

But what about all the cross-functional collaboration we just talked about? You need to find the right tools that help the team work together. There are several categories of collaboration tools, which include:

  • Video meetings, such as Zoom
  • Messaging, such as Slack
  • Virtual brainstorming, such as Miro
  • Project management, such as Trello
  • Product analytics tools, such as Mixpannel

If your team is hybrid or fully distributed, check out these tools for remote teamwork.

The most important tool, though, is your product management tool. ProdPad allows you to capture feedback, ideas, and strategy in one place. It also helps you present your product roadmap, manage experiments, and measure outcomes.

ProdPad is great for supporting your product management team structure

ProdPad is actually designed to improve team collaboration – not just for product people, but for everyone!

How to grow a product team

Another challenge in product team structure is knowing when to add a new member or when to start specializing in various product roles.

How and when to grow a product team depends on who you’ve already got and the skills they bring to the table. A great way to take stock of this is to audit each team member’s work. Not in a controlling, scary way – but just to answer the following questions:

  • What activities or tasks are of high value to the company?
  • What’s low value to the company?
  • What is each person good at?
  • What do they actually enjoy doing?

This is people management as much as growth management. First make sure your people are doing meaningful, interesting work. Then identify where the gaps are.

Once you do identify needs, hire slowly (if you can). Each new person brings a new shape and dynamic to the team. Let them integrate into the team, and let the team adjust. Then look again: what gaps are left to fill?

Hiring with intention allows you to create the team and the culture. From there you can evaluate and iterate on the team’s structure.

On the verge of growing and want to do it right? Check out how to run a product manager interview and hire a product person.

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