Your Product Organization?

What kind of product organization do you have today?  I don’t mean at the surface-level, such as general team structure or which agile process you employ.  I’m trying to get to the heart of what your organization’s philosophical approach is to building software products.  This typically comes directly from the management approach of the CEO and/or founder(s) and of course, at what stage the company is currently.  I haven’t seen many truly valuable frameworks out there along with practical recommendations that help teams put a proactive plan in place to evolve.  I will say this article (and previous articles) from Marty Cagan provides a great way of classifying different product organizations and I always appreciate his strong bias toward what he refers to as “empowered product teams.”  What I would like to cover in this article is an attempt to offer up some practical advice to Product organization leaders and/or Product Managers that you can apply at the onset of this new year (and decade!) to influence evolution within your organizations.  
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Let’s start with a simple defining framework that we can use to align on terminology for the rest of this article.  Here is one way of classifying an organization’s product philosophy that will suffice for the purposes of today’s conversation: one can look at the stage of growth of the company (early, growth, mature) alongside the CEO/founders’ instinctive expectations or baseline approaches to accountability.  This visual provides a simple organizational evolution trajectory to consider:

What you see here is a simple representation of company growth transitions over time, along with a general evolution of the product organization’s role/responsibilities.  When a company is in early stage, the founders are typically the primary product strategists and must be hyper-focused on execution as fast as possible to get to a place where they can measure and assess product market fit.  In other words, they just want and need their team to carry out their vision. As the company grows into a mature organization, there ought to be an evolution of how accountability is distributed across the team, from simple execution of the founders’ vision to solving problems and driving market and customer impacts. 
 
There are a few trajectories that can play out over the course of a company’s life cycle, depending on the philosophical grounding of the executives (CEO and founders).  I’d throw in factors in/around trust and what talent-level or domain expertise exists on the team as well. The less trust or domain knowledge that exists, the more the executives/founders will seek out executors or “doers”.  Alternatively, organizations may actually have executives/founders who may not have expertise in building strong product experiences, or who simply are too trusting of their teams’ abilities to execute strategically. These execs may ultimately need to place much more emphasis on hiring strategic domain experts to rely on building the right products for the customers they are serving.  This trajectory has its own pitfalls/risks, particularly when it comes to ensuring the right strategic SME is hired and onboarded properly.
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If this general line of thinking resonates with you, keep reading - I’m going to attempt to boil it down even further (If not, leave comments below with your thoughts and opinions!).  What this trajectory can look like at any given time is a snapshot at your product organization’s talent needs. What the following quadrant graphic shows is the type of personnel that really ought to be a part of your product organization, depending on where your org falls on the spectrum of size and accountability/trust structures:

  
In a nutshell...Lower Left quadrant (Little-to-no accountability / trust structures in place and earlier stage): 
Your execs are probably the primary drivers of strategy and product vision. You don’t need Product Management at this point, just executors like engineers and designers.
Upper Left quadrant (Some accountability / trust structures in place and medium-sized, growing company stage): 
You probably have your first Product Manager in place who helps drive execution at a day-to-day level, but who needs more guidance/supervision.  This is a dangerous stage to be in - trust is starting to form but can be broken quickly if the company experiences setbacks; there may be early accountability structures in place such as OKR’s, but they are likely underdeveloped and/or evolving.  
Upper Right quadrant (Accountability structures in place, trust exists, and the company is mature):
At this point there is probably a multi-person product team with a product development organizational structure that allows for empowered teams to execute against product visions driven by the product managers, with clear accountability against market/customer outcomes.  This is when it is good to have Sr. Product Managers who bring added level of professional maturity and domain expertise, who are capable of leading large initiatives strategically.
Lower Right quadrant (Underdeveloped accountability structures or a lack of trust within a larger, mature company environment):
In this scenario, it’s probably best to have a product organization that is made up of Project Managers and/or Program Managers, or even Engineering Managers who take on some product roadmapping responsibilities.  This is not a scenario where a Product Manager is needed, or where one will thrive for long. This type of organizational situation can stem from many scenarios, whether it’s that the founder(s)/execs never were able to let go of their product ownership (there are many articles and case studies out there about this), HR leadership never ensured the proper accountability and success measures were put into place to clearly empower people and teams, etc.  Regardless of how this organizational situation has arose, this is one where true Product Managers will very likely not be happy, nor thrive. 

Now what - Where do you want to be?

If you are tracking so far - the question becomes, so what?  If you are able to identify what type of organization you are a part of, does it matter?  It is what it is...right? Well, it depends. The question to ask is where do you want your product organization to end up?  Whether it’s 3 months from now or 2 years from now - what do you want to see improved? And the second question to ask yourself is, will you have a reasonable chance of influencing change to get to where you want to be?  If not, you need to decide if you can put up with the state of the union at your current company, or consider looking for another organization to join that aligns more closely with your vision. Assuming you feel reasonably confident you can inspire change, I offer up some practical advice to consider trying out as 2020 kicks off.  This advice is the same whether you are a Product Manager working within a Product Development organization, or if you are the Sr. leader or executive leading that Product Organization - how you go about influencing / enacting that change will be different of course.#1 - Implement or strengthen foundational accountability structures - If your organization does not have the right structures in place to clearly and publicly declare what outcomes the product team should drive, this should be the first area of focus.  Some organizations have OKR’s or MBO’s, but are so high level without proper hierarchical ties down to the product roadmap, there is not a clear sense of what results any given team must drive. If the accountability “pipeline” doesn’t go all the way from the top to the bottom, then it will not be a big surprise that the executives/founder(s) cannot easily empower the teams to take on their own problem domains and for the Product Managers to set their own strategic visions.  Make sure there is a clear, tight connection between each Product Manager’s area of ownership and the corporate goals the company executives are focused on. Practically, one example of this could be to ensure that every Product Manager creates his/her own OKRs that clearly contribute to the company-wide OKRs. Of course, with SMART objectives that are quantified and achievable. 
#2 - Build trust with the executives/founder(s) - this is admittedly a bit squishy, but don’t expect the executives/founder(s) to suddenly start trusting their product organization to deliver results simply because the product folks want more empowerment.  Product teams must demonstrate success *before* they are empowered. What can this look like practically? If executives/founder(s) are driving the product roadmap and vision, then a product organization can build trust by becoming extremely predictable in delivering features to the market, ensuring there are never any surprises in what they deliver, and ensuring that quality is top notch.  Remember the executive/founder mentality in many of these situations is that they feel they must oversee the strategic vision and ensure execution aligns to their vision. If the product team builds trust at the execution level, then it will be that much easier to begin to take on more and more ownership and empowered decision making responsibilities from the executives/founder(s) as the company grows.
#3 - Align organizationally to talent needs today and for the future - Use the organizational diagrams above to match the type of product talent you need for today, but also for the future.  This could mean hiring a different role than Product Manager to begin with, just to ensure execution is handled properly/well. But, ensure that a proper hiring plan is put into place that aligns to where you want your product organization to evolve, and proactively work on budgeting allocations and approvals to that plan, as you work on #1 and #2 above.  That way, as you begin to build trust, take on more empowered leadership with your product organization teams, and execute against very clear accountability measures that tie to corporate objectives, you will be able to more efficiently build the team in step with your organizational evolution.

If you are a Product Manager who has a different vision in mind than where you find your product organization today, use the above as a guide to influence in your individual contributor role.  Use those characteristics that make you a good PM, in particular strong communication skills, persuasiveness, and being data-driven, to influence organizational change.  

If you are a Product Organization leader, use the above practical advice to put the right organizational foundations in place, and manage your team’s execution to build trust in such a way that you can ultimately get to your vision of a stronger, more future-proof product organization that will align with where your organization is growing.