Made in Humane Club
The Product Organization
Imagine the human body. It has specialist organs like the brain, heart, liver, and others. Connecting all of them is the central nervous system.
Similarly, the product organization within your company is a bureaucratic decision-making institution that is focused on identifying, digesting, and simplifying complexity so that it can optimize, if not amplify, the business impact of value creators — Technology, Editorial, Data Science — using experiment-driven development.
What product teams do can be summarized in three words:
“Have you ever felt that nothing is really moving? Nobody knows the answer to this question. Everyone is working hard. You see people everywhere slogging diligently. But nothing is moving. No one has any answers.”
Sidu Ponnappa
Why it matters: Invest in a product team when your value creators can’t deliver value to customers.
Shaping Problem: You’ve business goals or problems to solve but aren’t sure what is the best options (ideas) to consider.
Shipping Problem: As the company becomes a behemoth, the complexity grows to a level… where you start feeling that nothing is moving
How does a product team help: Its job is to provide clarity, coherence, and direction to cross-functional teams so everyone is working towards growing specific business metrics. They are responsible for saying NO so most accidental complexity can be removed.
“I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.”
Frederick P. Brooks from No Silver Bullet, 1986
Who: To staff the product organization, you’ll need to hire: Chief Product Officer, Product Manager, Program Manager, Product Analytics Manager, and Product Owner.
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