The Zero to One of moving into PODs

How migrating into a pods structure multiplied our team’s focus, efficiency and accountability

When you join Yourstory, you don’t just join a company, you join an ecosystem — an ecosystem that has been residing at the heart of the Indian startup sphere since a decade — observing, sharing and fuelling its growth.

While there are multiple inherent advantages of being an ecosystem player, our biggest challenge has been that almost every good idea our team comes up with, aligns with shaping one part of the ecosystem or another. At Yourstory, we often come across ideas that we are very uniquely positioned, and more often than not, best positioned to pursue and grow. In fact, the toughest decisions that we have taken in the last few years have been those that involved saying no to some of these compelling ideas.

We realized we cannot eliminate this juxtaposition for us, it’s inherent to our positioning and who we are. What we can do, however, is structure ourselves better so that the blow of saying no doesn’t hit us hard. And so in March 2022, we started brainstorming on the main challenges

1. We were operating in a hub-and-spoke model. At the onset of a product, feature or brand launch, we would identify the best team for it and get going from there.
2. Product managers and tech leads were owning outputs, not outcomes. Because the teams worked on projects across multiple objectives, e.g. reach, revenue, brand, etc. they were not enabled to own outcomes against any of these.
3. One large, tightly coupled team An outlier project being prioritized or delayed, impacted every other part of the team due to a centralized structure of ownership for outputs.

We spent a few weeks clearly articulating these challenges in phases and once we were all clear and assertive about addressing these challenges, we took a step ahead and entered our solutioning mode.

Enter: Solution Mode

How did we decide on the 3 pods?

We analyzed the nature of outcomes across our different products, projects and features, and mapped them against key objectives of the company.

By May 2022, we had re-organized our entire Product-Tech-QA function across three pods, each having its own outcomes and metrics, and more importantly its own micro-owners.

What are the three pods?

Every pod has a dedicated Product manager, a fully enabled development squad with engineers across capabilities front end, back-end, APIs and infrastructural, and dedicated bandwidth allocated from the product design and QA teams.

Keeping in mind the goals of Yourstory, we dedicated the teams across 3 key objectives:

• Growth — Because if you are not growing at a fast pace, you are de-growing
• Revenue — Because we believe in making businesses self-sustaining
• Content — Because content is our core, and our core needs and deserves dedicated work so we can keep beating our own benchmarks

How’s it going so far?

We have seen a tremendous shift in the four key pillars that drives any team to becoming a high performing one:

• More ownership — With dedicated pods, every team member started aligning themselves to one larger outcome. This instilled a sense of deeper ownership in them
• More Focus, More Speed — With fixed outcomes clearly laid out, we saw everyone being able to multiply their focus and hence achieve speed we had never seen before
• Better communication, Better outputs — With a dedicated, smaller team to work with, our communication became more efficient, the benefits of which directly trickled down to the quality of our outputs
• Loosely coupled — With pods being self — sufficient, we saw a huge shift in the delays of one pod not impacting the others.

About Author : Laveena Punjabi, Head — Product, YourStory

An alumnus of BITS Pilani, Laveena has 10 years of experience, majority of which she has spent in startups. Her experience spans domains like SaaS, food, and internet-first products, among others. She had also founded D2C brand That Food Company. Laveena has spent the last 4 years building and growing tech and tech-enabled products. At present, she is heading Product at Yourstory and aims to make it the largest startup storytelling platform in India. Besides building products, Laveena has a keen interest in writing and filmmaking and believes storytelling is the most primal way of establishing a real, human connection.Read more at: https://yourstory.com/team