Product Collective - 💪 Strong product team = strong product

Build a strong team to build a successful product

Building a successful product is a team sport requiring people with a wide range of skills and backgrounds. When you bring a team like that together, the way you structure it can often be the difference between the surprise underdog that wins a championship, or the favorite that flames out because of infighting. We’ll let you insert your own team names for each example.

This week in product news, we look at how AI can spawn millions of chatbots and at the same time provide a single answer to your burning questions. We also look at Apple loosening its tight grip on in-app payments and the fall of an online retailer.

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4 Effective product team structures. Before a product team introduces a new feature or launches the next version of their product, they have to figure out how to work together. Yet, so many product leaders overlook the most important part of enabling the product team to work towards their goals - their team structure. Ravi Mehta explains that a well-built product team structure helps everyone know precisely what they are accountable for in the product development process. (via Reforge)

4 Ways to Build Your Product Team Structure Scaling your product team can be a massive challenge in today’s fast-paced business world. As your organization grows, you need to ensure that your product team structure can keep up with the demands of your ever-expanding customer base. An effective, scalable structure is at the heart of any successful product team. Vy Le explains how to structure a software product development team for delivering high-quality products and services to your customers. (via Orient Software Development Corp.)

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Join your product peers for inspiring keynotes and networking, valuable insights, and actionable strategies. Ultimately, you'll be empowered to gain more influence, spend your resources wisely, enhance your skills, and build meaningful connections. And if you register this month – you’ll save up to 30% on your passes – don’t miss out!

• ​New York Product Conference (New York City): April 18, 2024
• ​European edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference (Dublin, Ireland): June 17-19, 2024
• ​Global edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference (Cleveland, Ohio): September 23-25, 2024

This Week’s Video

0-1 Product teams- hire & scale your first product team. Founders and heads of product at early-stage companies are often trying to do two impossible things at once: take a product from 0-1 and take a PM team from 0 to 1. In this talk from INDUSTRY: The Product Conference in 2018, Merci Victoria Grace explains how to avoid common hiring & process mistakes in those crucial early days so you can find the right PMs (or hire your first PM), build trust, and grow while maintaining momentum.

This video, and many more just like it, are available on our Member Hub. If you don’t have access to the Member Hub already, you can join the community today for free.

Recruiting Product Teams

Recruiting Product Managers to your team is a nuanced art. Earlier this week, we hosted Julie Maurer – Founder of Silverline HR and Head of Talent for Product Collective, to unpack some of the vital strategies essential for recruiting such product people. Three big takeaways stood out…

1. Transparency in Culture: The foundation of a strong product team lies in the transparency of your organizational culture. Julie and I discussed the importance of being upfront about the real working environment and expectations during the recruiting process. If there's a mismatch between what's advertised and the reality, even the most talented recruits are likely to leave, seeking cultures more aligned with their values. This transparency extends beyond just the recruitment phase; it’s about maintaining an open dialogue about changes, challenges, and the company's direction.
2. Embrace the Marathon: The pursuit of finding exceptional product talent is more of a marathon than a sprint. Unlike more populous roles like Software Engineers, the pool of seasoned Product Managers is relatively small. Julie emphasized patience and persistence in this journey. Rushing the process can lead to suboptimal matches, which ultimately costs more time and resources in the long run.
3. Internal Promotion with Caution: Promoting from within can be an effective strategy, but it comes with caveats. It's crucial to identify the right traits in potential internal candidates (particularly if they haven’t had a true product role before). Simply moving an individual to cover a gap or mask issues elsewhere in the organization is a short-sighted approach. Look for signs of strong problem-solving skills, user empathy, and a strategic mindset. Remember, a great engineer or marketer doesn’t automatically make a great Product Manager. The transition should be based on potential and aptitude for product-specific challenges, not just convenience or tenure.

If you’re recruiting product people – the video of our session may be especially helpful to you. And if you need even more help, check out Talent+, as Julie is open to offering free consultations to help out!

Experiment like Spotify, with Confidence. Spotify created a set of experimentation tools that it uses to conduct multiple product experiments on a massive scale. It’s now offering those tools to external companies in a package called Confidence. This package replaces the build-vs-buy dichotomy with an API-driven approach to experimentation. Want to know how effective your text messages are? Customer engagement platform Twilio introduced Messaging Engagement Suite, a new product that helps you schedule messages around your customer’s preferred time periods, optimizes shortened hyperlinks for deliverability and clicks, and provides dashboards for experimentation and granular analysis. InVision design collaboration services shut down. Following Miro’s acquisition of Freehand, InVision decided to shut down at the end of 2024. The company did not give a specific reason for the shutdown. Posters on Reddit identifying themselves as customers or employees suggest “that instead of growing its products, the company allowed those products to get stagnant and failed to react to the market around it.” An example of why once you release a product you should continue to improve it. Amazon laying off 35% of staff at Twitch. The cuts, which impact about 500 employees, come amid concerns over losses at Twitch and after several top executives, including their chief product officer, left the company in the span of a few months. CEO Dan Clancy explained in a blog post that “the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in 3 or more years, not where we’re at today.” This is another example of a tech company that grew too quickly and is now looking to prioritize monetization.

Product Collective now offers Talent+, a ​white-glove recruiting service​ to help you and your team attract the most promising Product Management prospects. Combined with our uniquely specialized community of over 50,000 product people, we are well-positioned to help you fill even the most challenging product roles.

✔️ Product Managers -- be sure to share this exciting announcement with your management so you can help supercharge your team.

✔️ Hiring Managers and Recruiters - learn more about our services here and apply soon (the initial batch of hiring companies is limited to optimize your experience).

What you can expect:

• A quick pace – our average time to offer acceptance by your ideal candidate is 40 calendar days
• Comprehensive strategy session to understand your needs and your organization’s culture to ensure we find the right fit.
• Leveraging Product Collective’s specialized community to find the most qualified candidates.
• Competitive cost structures allow you to find the right candidate without breaking the bank.

Building High-Performing Product Teams As a product person, you can’t achieve product success on your own — you rely on the support of others, including stakeholders and development teams. Roman Pichler explains how to foster collaboration and form an effective product team.

How to structure your product development team. Behind every great product is a great product development team. Product development teams understand customer needs, create something new, and bring it to market. Besides choosing what to build, they communicate the benefits and measure the performance of the product — crucial duties within any company. The folks at Aha! Explain that there’s more to the product team than just engineering.

Resources and news curated by Kent J. McDonald.

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