4 Types of Technology Product Team Management

Product, Delivery, Technology and (Engineering) People management

All good teams require these types of management. Even if you are not thinking in these terms then they are important. From one-person projects to large products which need to be broken down across many teams.

With significant strategic products there is typically at least one person dedicated to each type of management per team. However you cut it in terms of people, organisation and overheads each management-type needs to be present for increased chance of success and cohesion with other teams and groups.

This is the difference between trying to solve problems together in a consistent and balanced way and just doing things (which may or may not be good).

This post does not go in to any depth regarding the management practises for each area.

Product Management

What?

Roles: Product Manager.

Product management is about working out how the team can best serve users. What functionality is needed? What user experience must be produced? Using various techniques we need to find the right path to tread and verify demand as cheaply as possible. What should we do? Importantly; what should we not do? We need to avoid wasting precious time and resources going down the wrong path for too long. Intelligently gather data and feedback and then react and pivot accordingly. Funnel what we learn into a roadmap, make the direction clear for everyone on the team and bring everyone along for the ride.

Resources

• Inspired (2008): Marty Cagan.
• The Lean Startup (2011): Eric Ries.
• Escaping The Build Trap (2018): Melissa Perri.
• Empowered (2020): Marty Cagan, Chris Jones.
• https://cutlefish.substack.com

Delivery Management

When? Where?

Roles: Delivery Manager, Technical Program Manager.

Delivery management is about actually making progress and getting work done. Being organised and clear and moving things to the right. It’s about agreeing to a set of priorities and sticking to that plan. It’s also about clear communication and stakeholder management when the plan inevitably needs to change. Can we honour our commitments? Can we coordinate complex dependencies with other teams? Can we clear out weird and wonderful issues that are getting in the way of the teams progress by practising Servant Leadership?

I see delivery work in technology as similar to that of a Producer in Entertainment and Media. Skills in project and program management are useful. So is knowledge of industry frameworks and practises like Lean, Agile, DevOps etc. but we need to be practical and pragmatic and avoid dogmatism that can sometimes be attached to different models of operation. As with many skills experience is key to improvement.

Many of the resources from Culture in Engineering People Management are also relevant for delivery.

(Engineering) People Management

Who?

Roles: Engineering Manager.

Engineering people management is ensuring that we have the right people at the right time so that we can achieve product, delivery and technical goals. We need the right abilities and attitudes and we need to structure our teams and processes to get the best out of people. People need to develop and grow. People need the right opportunities. People need to be heard and practises refined and adjusted accordingly. Too few people is bad. Too many people is bad (or at least requires more complex structures to enable). Too little experience is bad. Too much seniority is bad. The right balance in this area requires continuous attention.

Resources

People

• The Manager’s Path (2017): Camille Fournier.
• An Elegant Puzzle (2019): Will Larson.

Organisation

• Team Topologies (2019): Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais.

Culture

• The Phoenix Project (2013): Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford.
• The DevOps Handbook (2016): Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis.
• SRE (2016): Betsy Beyer, Jennifer Petoff, Niall Richard Murphy, Chris Jones.
• Accelerate (2018): Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, Jez Humble.
• The Unicorn Project (2019): Gene Kim.

Technical Management

How?

Roles: Engineer, Technical Lead.

Technical management is the use of various techniques, skills and domain knowledge to establish the best approach to solve specific product problems. The creation and execution of a technical plan which outputs the right product capabilities with the right user experience within various other constraints that need be considered. Once we have a technical path work needs to be broken up in to phases and chunks so it’s clear and approachable for the engineering team. This should always be a collaborative process and there will always be many unknowns that need to be uncovered. Work areas include:

• Technical standards and processes to collaborate and coordinate.
• Including Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). Security, testability, automation, observability, operability, developer experience. Specific performance and capacity needs.
• ITSM: Release management, actual operations, incident management, defect management.
• Technical enablement work for the product.
• Reliability and quality work. Technical debt management to ensure continued evolution and agility and lower certain risks.
• Prioritising other technical work such as migrations or cross-cutting changes which are important strategically for the organisation.

Often this work and process management is shared by an engineering manager and technical lead with the former trying to free up the latter to focus on designing and building to solve the core of the product problem.

Resources

• Staff Engineer (2021): Will Larson.
• https://staffeng.com
• https://medium.com/pareture/software-architecture-8ccb9924aacd
• https://medium.com/pareture/software-quality-non-functional-requirements-b83f1775e8ca
• https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebt.html

Management Balance

The risk is always a lack of balance in management needs. Bad outcomes are often a result of a certain type of management taking precedent or overpowering other forms.

• Chasing features such that reliability and technical agility suffers.
• Sticking too rigidly to a failing plan or on the flip-side trying to accommodate too many stakeholders and being stretched away from delivering value.
• Getting derailed trying to use a trendy technology or targeting a level of quality that isn’t warranted that unsustainably slows progress.

Coordination via clear goal-setting at various levels of the organisation can help teams stay on track. Systems thinking is also a concept that can help us choose and achieve goals in complex environments and improve decision-making within all that we do. It helps us continually focus on valuable outcomes from an end-to-end perspective and avoid misallocation into unimportant optimisations.

Resources

Goals

• Measure What Matters (2018): John Doerr.

Systems

• The Goal (1984): Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox.
• Thinking In Systems (2008): Donella H. Meadows.

Why?

These types of management cover the who, what, when, where and how but not the why. The why should be fairly consistent. In most cases it is to help achieve the stated goals of the organisation. Usually by contributing directly or indirectly to a future of sustainable profit. The product team does this by trying to help their target users in the most effective way they can imagine. Or by satisfying other stakeholders as a means of enabling impact for their target users.

Other skills

If you are responsible for one or a couple of these types of management then a few skills come quickly to mind that are generally useful.

1. Leadership to encourage positive behaviour in groups towards the goals.

• https://medium.com/pareture/a-useful-definition-of-leadership-5a210291094d
• https://medium.com/pareture/18-areas-of-leadership-285d9d8dc27e

2. Communication and collaboration as you will need to interface with different stakeholders and audiences. Working with high visibility is also a practise that can help with this.

• Making Work Visible (2017): Dominica Degrandis.

3. Basic data analysis so you can make sense of all of the various numbers that come up and show other people various implications.

4. Effective organisation and time-management so that you are using your own time and critically the time of others well.

5. Business skills; ensuring an efficient use of resources. Understanding opportunity costs.

6. Improvement practises; systematically ensuring you make meaningful improvement as time progresses.