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Having separate product and design teams is certainly one approach. However, separate teams for product and design easily leads to the organisational antipatte

Having separate product and design teams is certainly one approach. However, separate teams for product and design easily leads to the organisational antipattern where every feature implemented has to go through handoff between multiple teams. First product teams decide what to do, then design teams design it and hand off to UX for testing and later hand off to dev with full specification for building. When dev find that the designed/tested approach won't work due to implementation realities then it gets handed back over to the other team and so on. Changes can take a really long time to get implemented and often no one team is fully aware of everything from the tech challenges/limitations, the cost of different approaches, the design implications, and the value of different options. Each team also has different and often conflicting motivations. Ops teams want reliability, Product want to move fast, Design want consistency. It's challenging to make good decisions on the tradeoffs in this model. An alternative to this is vertically sliced teams where each team has all of the specialities embedded within it in order to look after a product. That means Dev, Product, Design, UX, Ops etc specialities within the team. They can then work together to add value to the product rapidly without handoffs between teams. When cross-functional teams work well they understand both the cost and value opportunities of things they could work on, and can propose and implement features quickly and without top-down command and control.

patothon 10y ago
This is classic matricial org oriented towards delivery. I've tried plenty of different orgs, and this is the most efficient structure I've been part of, or led. It's one of the leanest way of building products in discovery mode. We're doing this at Omada Health. It comes with its own challenges, though, as every organization: - the leadership team needs to accept a more bottom up approach to decision making (ie LT give direction and strategy, has a power of creating teams and defining their goal, but teams decide _how_ to reach these goals) - goals and KPIs need to be clear to everyone in the org, and in the team themselves - you need to be clear on the values of your teams at large or individually (focus on learning/exploration? Design "quality"? Timeliness of projects?) - you also need a certain type of teammates. Ones that sometimes can accept unclarity, ones that want to be part of whole product development lifecycle When you have these ingredients, it's beautiful to see unfold.
gsmethells 10y ago
You are definitely a CTO. And as one I agree completely. Without creativity in the hands of the craftsman who actually make the product there is no craft, only a tool.

patothon 10y ago

This is classic matricial org oriented towards delivery. I've tried plenty of different orgs, and this is the most efficient structure I've been part of, or led. It's one of the leanest way of building products in discovery mode. We're doing this at Omada Health. It comes with its own challenges, though, as every organization: - the leadership team needs to accept a more bottom up approach to decision making (ie LT give direction and strategy, has a power of creating teams and defining their goal, but teams decide _how_ to reach these goals) - goals and KPIs need to be clear to everyone in the org, and in the team themselves - you need to be clear on the values of your teams at large or individually (focus on learning/exploration? Design "quality"? Timeliness of projects?) - you also need a certain type of teammates. Ones that sometimes can accept unclarity, ones that want to be part of whole product development lifecycle When you have these ingredients, it's beautiful to see unfold.

gsmethells 10y ago

You are definitely a CTO. And as one I agree completely. Without creativity in the hands of the craftsman who actually make the product there is no craft, only a tool.