Are squads the ideal product organization?

Here are the key takeaways from our first Product Stories meet up about working in Product Squads from the Drivy, Blablacar and Mention teams. You can watch the full video or look read through the main takeaways, or both!

We’re excited to have hosted the very first Product Stories meet up at the Dashlane offices. Nicolas (Co-founder and CPO of Drivy), Benjamin (Lead PM at Blablacar) and Cyril (Head of Product at Mention) took the stage to share their experiences working in squads.

If you’re unfamiliar with what a Product squad is, we can only recommend Spotify’s handbook to get started.

Here are some of the juiciest takeaways:
Of course, none of these are cold, hard, facts. Just several viewpoints:

#1 — Why work in squads?

• The growth of your engineering team and hiring more Product Managers can lead to organization difficulties and, ironically, less productivity. For Blablacar and Drivy, squads were the solution to their scaling product team.
• For Mention, the Kanban methodology isolated PMs, Designers and Engineers. They’re starting to work in squads to get these teams to work as one team, not three different ones.

#2 — What’s a squad anyway?

Who’s in a squad?

• The most general interpretation is that a squad is a self-sufficient and autonomous group of engineers, designers and PMs within a company.
• But for Drivy it’s not so limited: there’s always a data analyst and even sometimes someone from Marketing or other Business Development departments depending on the needs.

What do squads work on?

• For both Blablacar and Drivy, squads are mission-based and reviewed quarterly.
• Big point of reference: Spotify’s handbook is a reference for lots of startups that start to venture in the squad organization.

#3 — The important traits of a squad

The two keywords that pop up when it comes to traits squad should have:

• Autonomy: the squad should be self-sufficient and have all the resources it needs
• Ownership: the squad defines its goals and owns the responsibility to deliver and follow-up on those

#4 — Benefits of working in squads

• For Drivy and Blablacar working in squads offer higher velocity of delivery in product and all in good quality
• Responsibilizing everyone — not just PMs — around product vision and end users. Specifically, engineers aren’t just asked to execute, but to bring ideas to the table.
• Drivy’s anecdote: the engineers came up with the solution to improve the payment feature in the app, leading to a much better user experience. They directly impacted the product’s direction.
• Blablacar’s anecdote: when the website was being revamped, a team of engineers came up with a slideshow of ideas for the Marketing team, according to what they believed was important to put forward for the end-users.

#5 — Delivering in squads: keeping everyone aligned

• There are many ways to structure the overall logistics of working in squads, the most crucial being reporting back to the rest of the company.
• At Drivy, they hold demo days every Friday, where all squads gather and show off their respective progress.
• At Blablacar, they send out a bi-weekly email to the entire company about product updates and upcoming features.
• At Mention, they have a dedicated Slack channel to announce new features every two weeks to the rest of the company

#6 — The exceptions to the rule

• Like any framework, the squad framework doesn’t adapt to every singe situation that arises in companies.
• Nicolas put it best: “The squad framework works for 80% of our work and it’s light enough to be adaptable to the 20% of non-squad-adapted exceptions.”

Dealing with unexpected quick fixes and improvements:

• Drivy has two Slack channels: #askasquad for people outside of squads to throw in requests and #crossasquad for requests that need to be dealt with but no squad is willing to take responsibility for.
• Blablacar is extremely radical about fixes and improvements: is it directly related to our goals? Unless the answer is yes, they skip them.

Big thank you to everyone who came out! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our community to stay in the loop about the next meet ups 👋

Curious to know more? Reach out to Nicolas, Benjamin et Cyril who’ll be for sure happy to pursue the discussion online!