Product vs. Feature Teams

Inside we detail the characteristics of the most effective product team structure...

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Marty Cagan has been a leader in the product space for decades. He is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group and has held leadership roles at Hewlett-Packard, Netscape, and eBay. He is a pillar of the product management industry and has continued to provide leadership through SVPG.

Product vs. Feature Teams

"The purpose of a product team in this sense is to solve problems in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.

As much as I might wish otherwise, I know that only a small percentage of teams out there are product teams in this sense.

Much more often than not, the teams are not empowered at all.  In contrast, they are there to serve the business."

He says there are three types of teams that work on products:

Empowered Product Teams

These teams are cross functional (product, design, and engineering) and are empowered to figure out the best solutions to the problems they have been asked to solve. They are focused on outcomes rather than output.

Delivery Teams

There are some developers and a product owner in this structure. The product owner functions as a "backlog administrator" and is concerned about output instead of the needs of their customers. This is the most common way a product team functions.

Feature Teams

These teams are all about output of features and occasionally projects. They take their direction from a prioritized list called the roadmap.

Product Risks

There are 4 types of product risk:

• Value risk (will people buy it, or choose to use it?)

• Usability risk (can users figure out how to use it?)

• Feasibility risk (can we build it with the time, skills, and technology we have?)

• Business Viability risk (will this solution work for the various dimensions of our business?)

In an empowered product team, the product manager is responsible for the value and viability, the designer for usability, and the tech lead for feasibility. The position of a product manager on an empowered team is exceptionally challenging because ensuring value and viability is not an easy task.

In a feature team, the designer is responsible for usability and the tech lead for feasibility, but the value and viability sits with the stakeholder or executive that requested the feature.

Characteristics of an Empowered Product Manager

For an empowered product manager, they deeply understand their customer, data, industry, and the business. In a feature team, this knowledge is spread among the stakeholders dictating the features. The product manager takes the role of "herding the cats" in order to get the feature designed and delivered. The product manager turns into a project manager.

Product managers should be some of the most talented people in the company consistently using their critical thinking ability to solve problems for their customers. "The CEO should view the product managers as potential future leaders of the company and the strong product manager is the CEO of the product."

Here are some questions you can ask to see if you are truly an empowered product manager:

• Are you provided roadmaps with prioritized features and dates, or are you assigned problems to solve with business outcomes?

• Is there role confusion between you and your designer?

• Is there role confusion between you and your delivery manager?

• Do you spend most of your day doing project management?

• Did you try using OKR’s and was it a mess, either ending up being rejected, or some contrived mashup of outcomes and features delivered?

• Do you have a team of missionaries or mercenaries?

• What is the level of accountability?

Being a product manager for an empowered vs feature team requires different skill sets and should really have two different titles. There are so few empowered teams out there that everyone's talent is underutilized. An empowered product team allows everyone to showcase their true potential.

Link to the full document from Marty Cagan here.

End Note

Thank you for reading.

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Have a great day,

Nick