The layered complexity of product teams
The target audience for this post are PMs and their cross-functional counterparts (ex: Engineering Managers, Tech Leads, Designers...) aiming to foster deep partnership within their product teams
The base layer of complexity for product teams
Through managing, mentoring and coaching Product Managers for many years now - there is one truism I’ve discovered. One of the most fulfilling experiences for PMs is to be part of a cross-functional product team that has deeply shared ownership, goals and motivations. Product teams like this march forward in unison, have strong trust & show up as a well-oiled machine. Its team members wake up each morning, drink their morning coffee/tea and obsess about their goals & ways to achieve them. This ideal is the apex and ultimate motivation behind why cross-functional product teams exist: the assembly of diverse, talented and motivated functional experts that partner together to achieve collective product success.
As I write this though, I must admit that this ideal can feel quite elusive, and is often not the reality many PMs get to experience. The topic of how to develop strong cross-functional partnership - and the frustrations that ensue when it isn’t there - is a recurring theme in many 1:1s and career development conversations I partake in. Why might that be the case?
In my experience, it’s important for PMs and other cross-functional team leaders to be aware that there is an amount of tension-by-design that is present when companies choose to organize into cross-functional product teams (or pods, squads, units, etc.). This is because that decision juxtaposes two different motivating theses:
Thesis 1 (goal-orientation): the likelihood of good product outcomes will increase through leveraging a diverse mix of functional expertise.
Thesis 2 (functional orientation): functional expertise aka craft is a continuum, and individuals must continue to develop and master their craft as they progress through their careers.
When I refer to tension-by-design, I am referring to this: at any given time, cross-functional team members are working to validate both theses above - even when they may be in conflict. To do so, individuals have to make a series of micro-decisions to tradeoff product outcomes & individual craft development.
For product team leaders - accepting this tension is a critical first step if you wish to setup your team for success and satisfaction. It unlocks you to work with your counterparts on navigating that tension by understanding on:
The goals and outcomes for the product over near & long term time horizons.
The accountability and incentives structures at play in the wider organization.
The personnel on the team along with their motivations, challenges, biases, etc.
The environment and processes needed for the team to collaborate and align effectively.
The values and traits that must underlie the team to navigate ambiguity and conflict.
When mapped out this way, it’s perhaps no surprise that product teams that partner & collaborate deeply together are not as common as they should be. Such teams are rarified because their leaders consistently do the work - the hard work - to intelligently balance product outcomes and craft on a continuous basis.
The next layer of complexity for product teams
To intelligently balance product outcomes and craft - even for a single product team - is a hard management problem in and of itself. However as products teams mature, it’s common for another layer of complexity to emerge - that of scale.
As products succeed, it is common for the product teams working on them to sprawl and mitosis into multiple teams (or groups) focused on distinct product areas and feature sets. Some teams may focus on expanding or extracting value from the core product (ex: growth), others may focus on building capabilities to enable quality/scale/extensibility (ex: horizontal platforms) and yet others spring up to pursue grassroots & greenfield opportunities (ex: 0-to-1 incubations).
By the time this sprawl has occurred, the organization now has more teams & functions working across more product areas. The product areas have a variety of distinct products goals. The organizational is likely more matrixed & layered (ex: Directors/GPMs in addition to PMs) as it’s gotten bigger. It’s also possible that newer, specialized functions are introduced to strengthen and support the larger organization (ex: Research).
To solve this, organizational leadership now has to address another layer of complexity: portfolio-orientation.
Thesis 3 (portfolio-orientation): investing in multiple ‘bets’ across the product will maximize the likelihood of overall product success across the near, mid and long-term time horizons.
Cross-functional leaders in charge of a portfolio of product bets have a unique set of challenges to work with. They must build conviction on product goals across bets that can be quite diverse or potentially in conflict with each other (ex: how do you approach OKRs for a part of your team growing a product with proven PMF vs. another part of your team validating a new bet?). They must build a cohesive opinion on prioritization and resource allocation across all bets - when they may be in very different stages and optimizing for different time horizons. And as functional leaders, they must also ensure the excellence, investment and calibration of craft across their organization - not just one team.
Portfolio orientation is a very tricky layer of complexity for cross-functional leaders to nail down. It requires making opinionated & often subjective judgement calls on global product prioritization. There is inherent tension in calibrating the functional craft needs within and across product bets. And many functional leaders have grown into their roles through a proven track record of excellence & affinity for certain kinds of product bets; not necessarily a wide diversity of them.
Before we move on, it’s worth noting that even individual product teams - when working on a large or complex enough scope - likely need to address the complexity of portfolio-orientation as well.
Navigating the layered complexity of product teams
If you are reading this post seeking a ‘solution’ to the layers of complexity I have laid out above, you may be disappointed. I don’t have one. The challenges of effectively leading & managing cross-functional product teams are hard and evergreen in nature. Both the problem space and the solution space are so contextual to the specific individuals and the domains they’re operating within. And I would say that tackling this multi-layer complexity is often what makes product leadership so interesting, so hard…and so fun!
Every framework, playbook and tactic I can share from my personal experience is highly context-specific, and it would be a disservice to share that here as broad advice. That said, I can try to share some high-level concepts that might inspire your thinking after reading this post:
If you are leading a portfolio of product bets, consider how you may..
Converge on leadership values & shared guiding principles to inform your decision-making.
Develop a rigorous investment strategy for the portfolio. Scrutinize and evaluate the assumptions behind it regularly.
Create strong feedback loops with your teams. Avoid one-size-fits-all management systems.
If you are balancing goal-orientation vs. functional-orientation for your team, consider how you may…
Converge on team values & product principles to inform your decision-making.
Ask each functional leader to wear two hats - that of ‘product leader’ and that of ‘functional leader’ when debating difficult decisions and tradeoffs.
Define a product strategy & goals that may optimally leverage or deepen the value of your team’s functional expertise.
Regardless of what layer of complexity you are trying to manage…
Seek to create a space where your functional counterparts can openly and vulnerably share their motivations, priorities, biases and concerns. The deep trust & discourse/debate that emerges from doing so is often more valuable over the long-term than the impact of any single product or organizational decision. Play the long game.