Product Teams start before implementation

In most organisations a product starts being defined during roadmap planning, often by gathering the Product Manager, CEO and, if you’re lucky, maybe a Product Designer and some other stakeholders.

But if the first time developers and designers see an idea is at sprint planning, it’s already too late.

Product teams need to be brought to product much before implementation — they need to be brought to product during roadmap definition and discovery!

This because product teams should be involved in understanding the problem that they’re going to solve. Or even better: to see it and feel it in real life. They should be involved in estimating the work if they are the ones who will do it. Product teams should be involved in discussing, brainstorming, and proposing creative approaches for the work they will be implementing, inside the constraints that exist — time, technical feasibility, costs, and business goals.

Product teams are much more than simple executers: they are empowered groups of individuals who understand the problem and care of what they’re building; and we should take advantage of that.

To create proper product teams is important to involve, at least the lead positions, in discovery and roadmap definition. To involve them in user feedback, in discussing what work should be done, and how to approach it.

Naturally, this is more difficult in practice than theory because, more often than not:

• Involving the team — even if just the lead positions — requires valuable time of many people, often necessary on other places of the org.
• Due to power asymmetries, meetings with high level stakeholders often result in more reluctant participation from the team.
• Developers, designers, etc, often see meetings as unproductive. Specially on the ones they just need to speak 10%-20% of the time.

This is something that I struggle as well at Whitesmith, but which it has been slowly changing, by involving teams sooner in the process of new products, exposing them more to the problem being solved, exposing them more to customers’ feedback, and by actively pulling them to participate in relevant conversations.

Because, even though it’s true that there are considerable upfront costs in terms of time usage, brain power and moderating conversations, there’s great impact in the medium term, not only on the product itself, but also on the teams’ empowerment and motivation.