"Product teams"

In the tech world, there are really three distinct types of, loosely speaking, “product teams.”

Delivery teams

Also referred to as “dev teams” or “scrum teams” or “engineering teams” and if your company is running something like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), then, unfortunately, this is you. In this situation, there are some developers and a product owner. The product owner in this model is what I refer to as a “backlog administrator.” This model is really just re-packaged waterfall and is not used at true tech product companies.

Product teams

They are cross-functional (product, design, and engineering); they are focused on and measured by outcomes (rather than output), and they are empowered to figure out the best way to solve the problems they’ve been asked to solve.

<aside> 👀 The purpose of a product team in this sense is to solve problems in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.

</aside>

Much more often than not, the teams are not empowered at all. In contrast, they are there to serve the business.

Feature teams

I am bending a little bit of the more established definition of feature teams here, but I am using the term because it helps to highlight that these teams are all about output. Features, and occasionally projects. Usually provided to the team in the form of a prioritized list that is called the roadmap.

Differences between product teams and feature teams

Recall that in product there are always four risks:

• Value risk (will people buy it, or choose to use it?)
• Usability risk (can users figure out how to use it?)
• Feasibility risk (can we build it with the time, skills, and technology we have?)
• Business Viability risk (will this solution work for the various dimensions of our business?)

In an empowered product team, the product manager is explicitly responsible for ensuring value and viability; the designer is responsible for ensuring usability; and the tech lead is responsible for ensuring feasibility. The team does this by truly collaborating in an intense, give and take, in order to discover a solution that works for all of us.

However, in a feature team, you still (hopefully) have a designer to ensure usability, and you have engineers to ensure feasibility, but, and this is critical to understand: the value and business viability are the responsibility of the stakeholder or executive that requested the feature on the roadmap.

Superficially, a feature team and a true empowered product team are both squads. So they look similar, but the differences run deep.

The role of the product manager