Product Development Team: Structure & Role
What is a Product Development Team
A well-organized and carefully structured development team marks the Inception of successful product creation. Having efficient and driven individuals is critical to determining the product’s success in the market milieu.
We will elucidate further as we delve deeper into this discussion and move forward.
Role of a Product Development Team
We cannot assert enough how significant the role of the product development team is. It facilitates the organization with strategic product leadership, which is immensely helpful in delivering the offering along with the correct market fit.
The product management team has myriad responsibilities, ranging from proper strategy implementation to useful feature planning to even more productive marketing.
The product team continuously studies the market to understand consumer needs and demands and respond to the competition strategically.
The product team’s essential function is assimilating the ideas of all the other teams by bringing them together. Usually, the team heads are frequently called to the meetings for discussion, including leaders from engineering, management, marketing, sales, and support teams.
Developing an incredible product for the consumer’s needs and ensuring success in the competitive market serves as an impetus for the teams to cooperate and work in synergy. The interests and opinions of different members within the groups can vary, but they essentially have to strike a balance and work in coordination.
The product development team ensures that all the specific groups exhibit some degree of empathy towards one another. This practice enormously helps in the smooth and facile working of all the teams to attain the ultimate goal.
The successful product development team observes the market and understands their team’s strengths and limitations, carve out effective methodologies and implement those efficiently. All of this helps to foster growth and yield excellent results.
‘Product development team is important to develop the product.’
The statement may be pleonastic or tautological but is also true.
What Is Group Product Development?
As we have already seen in recent years, product development involves a group effort called ‘Group Product development.’ Group Product development is significant for the success of new product development.
Group product development is a collaborative effort between different teams. Each team handles a sub-system or a module and then integrates their efforts to deliver the Group Product. Group product development is an approach to develop products across organizational boundaries with various groups, including developing, researching, designing, selling, and interacting with the customers and market.
It would be felicitous to say that in recent times, group product development has played a significant role in eliminating any internal kerfuffle in the whole developmental process. Group product development is a constructive one to accomplish the task in a time-bound manner.
Group product development has been an effective tool for any large-scale or massive project with multiple objectives and many activities. It is easier than the conventional technique of taking the work card system, and group product development provides a framework that offers a balance between resources allocation and risk allocation.
Team Structure For Product Development
It would be tough to determine the exact approach, which all the companies adopt to structure their product development.
There isn’t any straight-jacket formula for the same.
Different companies and organizations adopt other techniques in building their Product development team. While some stick to managing in-house employees, others might opt for team extension in Eastern Europe, etc.
This is also massively dependent on various factors, some of which are the company’s goals, ideologies, specific sort of market they intend to target, the kind of product they want to create, and many more similar factors.
Approach For Structuring
The traditional approach was to simply assign the responsibility of a single product to a product manager. Still, the same scenario doesn’t exist much in many present-day organizations.
The strategies have evolved and changed over the past few years.
The classical method adopted back in the day was called the Waterfall method, but today Agile structure and methodologies are a little more preferred. This can mainly be observed in software companies.
Companies can now employ different product managers. In the agile setup, the product manager leads all the specific teams and works closely with each one. This kind of setup helps in ensuring clarity and cooperation. This system is also more flexible than the traditional approach because the agile structure is usually cross-functional.
We highly recommend PMs use the top product management software to handle all tasks effectively.
Product Owner
The product development team’s voice and lead are the product owner. The Team is the group of people who do the work but have to follow what someone else says.
A team needs to be seen as a team and not a gaggle of individuals. The Team, all together, must feel like it is responsible for the product being developed, and it needs to be seen as an entity.
The product leader devotes a considerable amount of time observing the market and analyzing the customers’ needs. Therefore he directs about the features to incorporate in the product to perform better in the competitive market.
He needs to make sure that team members are engaged and motivated. Successes and failures are considered a team’s success or failure, and team members share ownership of the Product from conception to delivery. The team should be trained in brainstorming for solutions instead of criticizing each other.
He enlightens the team with a thorough knowledge of the competition, market, and related opportunities. This helps the team to perform in the right direction. Product owners should be responsible for decreasing Team risk.
He represents business in the Team, removes ambiguity, and deletes any misunderstandings arising because of language barriers. He also needs to have a good team agreement with all Team members so that everyone understands how his role will work and what is expected from them.
Overall, he examines the market, identifies the opportunities, and presents appropriate solutions.
Project Manager
A project manager ensures the smooth execution of the plan. His role is extremely vital because he manages the project of the Team. Although Team plays a significant role in the success of the project, still Project Manager is the one who coordinates Team.
How will you judge Team structure for Product development?
The team requires proper team structure to maintain efficient coordination throughout the Project. Team Structure for Product development is like an organization chart that ensures smooth implementation.
He is responsible for the projects, a task with particular motives or objectives that end once those goals are accomplished.
Team Structure must contain Team Leader, Senior Engineers, Engineering Team, and junior engineers Team. These teams are responsible for different activities assigned by the Project Manager or Team Leader. Team Structure could also include Internal Team and External Team because they play an essential role in coordination.
Engineering Team
In all forms of structure, a team of developers and engineers are ideally the part and play a significant role. This is more of a technical team that helps in ascertaining realistic targets. The team is the core strength of any organization.
Team members can be of different expertise and must be competent enough to deliver in time, often a crucial factor for software development. Team spirit, team ability, and infrastructure are essential factors that form a team structure for Product development.
Program Manager
Recently, program managers have been a vital part of the Product development team specializing in software companies in many organizations. He is responsible for communicating the objectives and strategies of a program.
While his responsibility is strategic, he does not have complete control over the implementation details, and he can only provide a framework for its support.
The main functions of the Program Manager include: To set objectives and strategies for a program, ensure that they are communicated to all concerned parties, and share on their behalf to other teams.
His role is cross-functional. He promotes team coordination and alignment and also checks whether the project properly complements one another or not.
UX designer
UX designer is vested with driving the aesthetics of the Product. As the name suggests, they design the user interface.
Team structure for Product development must allow the UX designer to spend time with users (where they get inspiration for designs) and understand their needs, and what motivates them to use your product.
Team structure for Product development should also allow UX designers to execute these ideas by arranging visual elements in a way that is easy to understand.
Data Scientist
Data Scientists are responsible for studying, analyzing, and interpreting technical and complex data to assess the business’s position and facilitate better Product performance.
It can be a valuable role in bridging the gap between Data Science and Product Team, which provides necessary market insights, predictive analytics & decision support to the Product Team.
Data scientists are interested in the following domains:
Structured and unstructured datasets for analysis from various sources like web, social media, Google Adwords, etc.
QA Tester
They are called quality assurance technicians. They scrutinize and review the product for any defects or errors that may be detrimental to the user experience. Their work is to ensure that the client or user receives top-quality services.
In order words, they play a crucial role in product development. These professionals should possess technical skills and knowledge of consumer behavior, and soft skills to understand the user’s needs, which will help them provide effective solutions that will meet those expectations.
Other autonomous product development team
These days some separate members enjoy independence from executives, usually referred to as a squad. They play a crucial role in what to produce, and they contribute through their extraordinary skills, which enable other members of the Team to gain expertise.
This is one of the most innovative models, and it has been recently popularized by “Spotify.” Even “Amazon” has introduced and implemented this model.
Can the Product Owner Be Part of the Development Team?
The answer to this question depends on the organization’s size and the product type. The Product Owner is often part of the Development Team in smaller organizations.
Small organizations usually don’t have dedicated Product Owners, and the person responsible for taking care of the Product Backlog will be part of the Development Team.
It makes sense to assume that an organization has enough staff to dedicate someone full-time to be a Product Owner in larger organizations.