5 Methods for Organizing Your Product Team to Maximize ... - Infinify

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1. Beyond the general guidelines above, try to split your product into actual domains based on each of the methods above. Evaluate each option based on the criteria we defined: completeness, independence, and balance. “You will immediately start to see which methods work better for you — some products, for example, have greater independence than others when splitting by personas, while other products split more naturally by the customer journey phases.” Don’t spend too much time on it initially, as at this point you are mostly trying to rule out some of the methods so that you can dive deeper into the remaining ones and find the optimal split.

   In Segmentation

2. With teams that really worked well together, I asked them to come up with a proposal on how to split their responsibilities. It typically led to good results with a split that everyone (including me) was happy with. “Note: having clear responsibilities doesn’t mean that you lose the flexibility to add or change them. Ad-hoc projects which don’t necessarily belong in specific domains will still be handed over to team members based on the specific needs and availability of each, and in times of load product managers can help each other and take ownership of specific parts which would naturally fall in another person’s domain.” Still, having clear boundaries is an important starting point to know which boundaries you feel more comfortable bending, and when and why to do so. And most of the time the boundaries will hold.

   In Cross-team accountability model

3. Note: having clear responsibilities doesn’t mean that you lose the flexibility to add or change them. Ad-hoc projects which don’t necessarily belong in specific domains will still be handed over to team members based on the specific needs and availability of each, and in times of load product managers can help each other and take ownership of specific parts which would naturally fall in another person’s domain. “Still, having clear boundaries is an important starting point to know which boundaries you feel more comfortable bending, and when and why to do so. And most of the time the boundaries will hold.” Of course, like anything else in an agile world, the boundaries need to be rethought of every now and then — when it stops working for you, when you go through major changes or when new responsibilities are added to your team.

   In Cross-team accountability model

4. 3. Balance “The split should be balanced throughout the product team — according to the desire, load, and capabilities of each team member.” Note that balance doesn’t necessarily mean equal load, capacity or responsibility. It means that each team member owns something they can succeed in, in a way which contributes best to the overall team goals.

   In Account allocation and ownership

5. The split should be balanced throughout the product team — according to the desire, load, and capabilities of each team member. “Note that balance doesn’t necessarily mean equal load, capacity or responsibility. It means that each team member owns something they can succeed in, in a way which contributes best to the overall team goals.” Since balance is very specific to each team and the people in it, I will only rank the following methods according to completeness and independence.

   In Account allocation and ownership

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