I have had the chance to work on the Product and Technical team structure of several tech businesses. One particular exercise I found very simple yet useful: to draw up a detailed list of the responsibilities of the Product team.
Four areas of responsibility
We typically found Product responsibilities fall within 4 areas:
Responsibilities of a Product team
The 4 areas are very distinct:
Product Direction is what people most often understand Product Management to be about. It can be seen as a linear process of understanding a market and identifying opportunities for new products, creating on long-term Product vision and a roadmap for how to get there, fitting new products into the market and advocating publicly about it all
Commercial Guidance is about helping the commercial teams (Marketing, Sales, Customer Success) - from internal training to being an escalation point for customer issues
Developer Guidance is about defining what products and features need to be developed and why this is the case, working with and motivating the development teams on a day-to-day basis
Team Management covers leading the Product team itself
This list is naturally not definitive - technology businesses come in all shapes and sizes, so I’d recommend anyone to go through that exercise themselves. You may come up with a similar outcome but with a few crucial differences.
Why this matters
You can use this as a checklist of what needs to be done. Whether you already have an established Product team, or are sharing these responsibilities across other teams, make sure no important duty gets missed
By giving clear responsibilities to everyone within a Product team, you can get them to focus their efforts and give them objectives to be measured against
Explicit responsibilities help drawing a line between Product, Marketing and Development teams - reducing unnecessary doubling of effort and territorial conflict. This is especially important if you are in the process of establishing a Product team from scratch
That final point does not mean that Marketing, Product and Dev should work in separate silos. On the opposite, they should act more like departments who combine to create joined-up teams.
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