GOOD vs GREAT Product Teams
You won’t stand a chance to build a great product without a great product team.
If you think so you can build a great product without a great product team, you’re wasting your time and money.
A great product isn’t a matter of resources.
You can’t just buy it.
Did you know that the first iPhone touchscreen was built by a dozen of people? That WhatsApp reached 900M users with less than 50 engineers?
The best product teams in the world are nimble with a little “Je ne sais quoi”.
I’ve had the chance to observe dozens of them.
Here is what I think differentiates them.
❌ First, what makes a bad product team ❌
First, let’s see what breaks a product team:
- No clear ownership and purpose: even the best teams won’t get anywhere if the team’s purpose isn’t clear. I’ve seen that countless of times for political reasons.
- Hierarchical org: product teams work in a flat organization. I’ve seen large groups trying to fit product teams into vertical operations. It simply doesn’t work.
- Not cross-functional: the product teams should handle the planning, design, and engineering all within this team. It needs the following skills: PM, product engineer, product designer, product marketing, QA (no need for a person in each specific role though). Including product marketing skills in the team changes everything.
✅ What makes a GOOD product team ✅
- Small cross functional team: to keep your team agile, you should keep product development teams small. In a large team, communication can become difficult. Stick to a team fed by “2 Pizza” (6–8 people).
- Appropriate resources: similar to what breaks a product team, what makes it work is getting the right resources (headcount, skills, external resources, toolings & processes).
- Focused on the outcome instead of outputs: product team should aim to deliver business results instead of features.
⭐️ What makes a GREAT product team ⭐️
Like many things in life, little things differentiate good from great. These are the things I wish I knew a lot of these things before I started my career in product management.
- A team vision: great product teams don’t replace the founder’s vision, but they translate it to their team. An inspiring vision helps teams ship innovative features.
- Ownership: great teams have end-to-end ownership. Whether their customers are external or internal.
- Trust: when everyone moves fast you can’t triple-check what others do. You need trust.
- Kindness: great teams are kind and genuine. They help each other not because they have to but because they want to. Having a mix of cultures is also a superpower, it’s like having 100 customers around the table.
- Great communicators: one mantra from agile is “interactions over process”. Whenever they can, great teams solve topics through communicating instead of a tool.
This list is far from being exhaustive 😉
But it has a point: it’s focused on the most important things I’ve seen in my 7 years in product management.
