Empowered and Impactful Product Developments Squads
In this article, I share my insights as a product manager on an impact-driven product development squad.
As a product manager, I have been working with a scrum development team for two years. I have noticed that in a development team that works on one product, each developer does his tasks, and there is a dependency between team members. For example, the backend developer has finished his work, and now he is waiting for the frontend developer to end as well or vice versa. I have also noticed that there is often more than one product manager in the same domain in large systems.
It made me wonder, how can we work more efficiently and quickly? I was exposed to the Spotify squad model, and then I got my answer.
I realized that working in a Squad product development team allows any product manager to be responsible and lead the team to address the company’s business goal. Besides, this structure makes it possible to promote several business goals at the same time while reducing friction and splitting of development resources.
In this article, I want to share my insights as a product manager within an impact-driven product development squad. I was responsible for certain components as part of the extensive system. Along with me on the team were the frontend developer, backend developer, QA, and a product designer.
Autonomous and empowered team
Each team is responsible for producing an impact on a business goal and/or a customer’s needs. The product manager is responsible for defining the company’s business goal, explaining what the roadmap and KPI / OKR are, and not describing the features that need to be developed. Our entire team, made up of different disciplines, think together about designing the best solution. It is an empowered team where all team members are involved in the thought process.
Moving the needle
As a product manager, my role is to direct and guide the team to invest the efforts and focus on the squad’s goal. My responsibility as a product manager is to define the top-line metrics and the business KPI, and together with the team to design the most tailored solution for this goal. The effort can be a direct solution characterization to a top-line metric. Another way to achieve this is to improve the KPI of the supporting metric, i.e., KPI that supports the primary KPI. A third way is to focus on improving metrics that enhance the supporting metric. In conclusion, at any given moment, make sure the team is focused on only one goal.
Deliver capabilities in agile iterations
Developing and releasing capabilities quickly over time, which assembles the entire system, creates a significant trust with the customers and the company’s internal teams. Our goal as a squad is to release the features and get a signal as quickly as possible. These signals prove or deny the hypothesis, whether what we have developed is correct or whether we need to change it. In summary, deliver quickly, validate quickly, and fix quickly.
In all the cases I’ve mentioned, the emphasis is on creating influence, confidence, trust, and empowerment.
Not everything is black or white.
Within a product development team, there can be challenges and dilemmas that every company faces differently. I will try to name several challenges or difficulties here.
- Technical debt and bugs — on the one hand, the squad reached its goal, and on the other hand, there are technical debts and bugs. Is it the squad’s responsibility to handle them as part of a technical backlog? Should a dedicated team do it?
- How to create system infrastructures that are adjusted to all teams?
- How to design robust architecture that is tailored to all teams?
- What happens to the team when they achieve the goal? Break up or continue together to the next task?
- How to coordinate releases with other squads?
- Professional Development — how to develop team member proficiency? to expertise and specialization in a particular subject in-depth or get to know other parts of the system as well?
- How to integrate algorithms, research, BI, and marketing in the squad? Do they move between groups as needed?
In conclusion, I learned that moving from the Scrum team to squads is a process that doesn’t occur immediately. Each company needs to do it differently and finds the balance required to adjust all the departments involved while implementing the new method.
My experience as a product manager working in squads has been fascinating. I felt empowered and a leader; together with all the team members, we achieved its business goals and addressed the customers’ needs. The important lesson I learned is that squad is not the goal, but it is a way to impact the company. My working relationship with R&D improved, and we had an excellent collaboration that affected moving the needle. This feeling led to a passion for achieving the next goal.
Written by Maayan Galperin
