Product, Strategy and Teams

I recently had one of those fortuitous moments in which the very thing I had been working through in a day to day work context, collided with the podcast at the top of my feed. In this case, it was Mind the Product’s interview with Marty Cagan, of Silicon Valley Product Group.

(Interview here: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-vision-and-strategy-marty-cagan-on-the-product-experience-part-1-of-2/)

In this interview, Marty talks about product vision and strategy: vision identifies the North Star- there the organization, company or product is going, and strategy is how to delivery on that vision. Marty also discusses three types of product teams that exist within organizations: Delivery teams, Feature teams and Empowered Product teams.

Having spent time on the client side at large organizations (at varying states of “digital transformation”) and on the agency side, trying to help organizations large and small make their own transformations or evolution, Marty’s clear articulation of these teams is helpful in understanding how and why (or why not), organizations and digital product teams are successful (or not) in the digital space.

The teams:

• Delivery Teams- they are executors, a backlog and developers, running and crossing things off the list
• Feature Teams- they are there to design, code and deliver against wants, needs and/or a roadmap. They may have a Product Manager or Product Owner but that role is largely as a Project manager, making sure people know what they’re doing and by when, and that the team is on track.
• Empowered Product Teams- these are the teams digital strategists like myself dream of. These teams are given problems to solve and teams of creative experts to experiment to try and solve them. Empowered Product Teams have a clear vision of the future and strategy and are able to iterate and work towards the target outcomes.

So the question is — what type of teams do you have? What types of teams do you want to have? Are you giving them what they need to succeed? In the case of Delivery teams, what do they need? A backlog. A healthy task list they can work on.

For Feature teams, they need features to build — how are you determining these features? Who is determining them, and when, and why? (And are those people working against a clear vision and strategy?)

For Empowered teams — Are you giving them the opportunity and clear space to go after what could be and what that means?

And is your vision and strategy being shared at the right level, with the right roles?

In the case of Delivery teams — Vision and Strategy are either non-existent (although no strategy is a strategy) or not shared.

For Feature teams, the assumption is that it exists somewhere, but removed from the team enough that by the time it gets to that team, the pieces have already been determined.

And for Empowered teams — they are as close as they can be to it, being given the vision and the strategy and then having the ability to determine when, where and how to go after it- how to try and solve the problem to seize the opportunity, and to test and learn along the way.

What types of teams do you have? Are they working for you? How might you evolve from where you are to where you want to go?

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