I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and product leaders and when I ask them how they define their product teams, the standard reply is :
Product management team = Product team.
Product team = Product management team.
This is wrong. Totally wrong.
Product team isn’t just your product management team, but the team that owns the product ‘KRA’.
And that should ideally include representation from engineering (+QA), marketing, sales and customer support.
Why most products fail?
Most of the products don’t meet their desired goal because the different teams remain in their silo and do not talk to each other.
It’s not that the different teams never come together – they do, but by the time they come to the common table, the damage is already done.
Engineering has already built something which marketing doesn’t know how to market and support is still struggling with last release’s issues.
It soon becomes a battle ground led by ‘the senior-most voice in the room’ and gets farther away from the customer success goal.
Beyond the initial success (of product/market fit), the disconnectedness starts to show up in the execution – in marketing messaging, sales proposals and unclear product features start adding up.
The only way to bring them together is by building a ‘product team’, which represents all the important stakeholders – across all the teams.
Easier said than done, isn’t it? Hint: this is a political battle inside any organization irrespective of size.
What’s your take?
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