Exploring the Anatomy of Successful Product Team Structures

I’ve worked at several organizations that have structured their product management teams differently. This post is not to highlight my opinion on which I feel is most valuable or ideal because it truly depends on so many factors including but not limited to…

How many developers the product team works with
How many QA professionals the product team has to help test
How many UX individual contributors the product team can request design work from
What ROI the product team is expected to generate
The overall size of the organization
How new the product team is and how new the product discipline is
The list goes on!

So rather, I’m going to focus on the various set ups that I’ve seen so that you are at least aware of what kind of environments you may find yourself in, or provide you new insight that you may not have considered before.

Let’s dive in.

Management vs. Individual Contributors

Let’s give some very high level definitions of the roles here so as you progress down into team structures, we’re talking the same language.

Note: A senior product manager, for example, may have very different responsibilities at a start up vs. a Fortune 500 company. There is still a need for there to be macro mechanisms to appropriately and properly level product persons in the right title, but until then, recognize there is a difference and that you may have responsibilities less than or beyond what is listed below.

High Level Role Definitions and Responsibilities

Analyst of Product Management:

An Analyst of Product Management delves deep into data and user feedback, offering insights that help in defining requirements and enhancing product functionality, while ensuring alignment with the broader product vision and business strategy.

An Analyst of Product Management will…
•Describe and own user stories
•Analyze existing analytics for trends
•Report out hurdles in process of product feature/function
•Handle cadenced reporting on execution and product value
•Engage in user acceptance testing
•Support associate product manager and product manager
•Support co-creators and remove hurdles

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Associate Product Manager

An Associate Product Manager aids in the execution of the product roadmap, collaborates with cross-functional teams, drafts user stories, and manages smaller product elements, acting as a bridge between user needs, business goals, and the engineering team.

An Associate Product Manager will…
·Analyst of product management responsibilities +
·Be the primary owner of user story creation to support epics
·Be the primary owner of removing hurdles for agile teams
·Analyze qualitative feedback
·Support epic and pitch deck creation and own small/medium epics
·Own A/B testing execution
·Write a weekly newsletter for the features they own

Product Manager / Sr. Product Manager

A Product Manager is the primary owner of the product roadmap, striking a balance between customer and business value, overseeing product backlog, leading cross-functional teams, and ensuring the product’s alignment with the overarching strategy and vision.

A Senior Product Manager, Lead Product Manager, Product Director spearheads the product strategy, manages complex product roadmaps, supervises product teams, holds the vision for product themes and goals, and ensures effective communication with leadership while juggling multiple product projects.

A Product Manager or Senior/Lead Product Manager or Product Director will handle…
·Associate product manager responsibilities +
·Strategy, roadmap and pitch deck owner
·Speaking engagements that discuss feature launches, announcements to other business units and customers
·Manage external stakeholders’ expectations and alignment
·Partner with marketing, merchandising, analytics and insight, and leadership
·Supervise product managers supporting shared teams and projects
·Responsible for quality user stories for co-creators
·Manage business KPIs and agile team metrics
·Review updates strategy and roadmap with leadership
·ROI and prioritization
·Establish KPIs for the features/functions and analyze fluctuations in secondary and third-level indicator metrics
·Create and maintain feedback loops to review customer sentiment
·Run multiple iterations and start new projects simultaneously with expected efficiency and value for the business and customers

Note: An individual contributor who is beyond a product manager will handle everything above but for multiple products and features sets. Also, a Product Director is still an individual contributor and is the highest level at some orgs without managing others.

Technical Product Manager

A Technical Product Manager, leveraging a background in engineering or software development, delves into the technical intricacies of a product, ensuring the product's design and features align with engineering capabilities, and bridges the gap between technical requirements and broader product strategies.

A Technical Product Manager …
·Navigates the technical landscape to align product development with current and emerging tech trends
·Serves as the technical authority within product teams, guiding decisions on architecture, tools, and platforms
·Collaborates with engineering leads to prioritize and tackle technical debt and infrastructure improvements
·Conducts technical risk assessments, proposing mitigation strategies to align with product goals
·Fosters a culture of innovation, encouraging the exploration of new technologies to enhance product offerings
·Advocates for best practices in system design, coding standards, and technical processes
·Facilitates technical workshops and training sessions to elevate the team's technical acumen
·Manages stakeholder communication, translating complex technical concepts into business-friendly language
·Monitors industry developments, ensuring the product's technical evolution stays ahead of the curve

Those are the baselines for individual contributors.

As we look at management, I’ll sum it up very quickly… you are managing other product managers with the exception that Group Product Managers will also still do individual contributor work. One of the hardest career paths is going from an individual contributor to a manager of product management or group product manager where your day to day goes from building experiences for customers to drive business value to now managing others and dealing with everything that management comes with. Another post for another day!

Now let’s get into the team structures

Example 1: Close-Knit Group

In this close-knit structure, we've got a tight ship where the Product Manager not only steers the product's course but also mentors the Analyst of Product Management or Associate Product Manager. This isn't a towering hierarchy; it's more like a dynamic duo (or trio), where the Product Manager fosters growth, ensures the roadmap's on track, and keeps the day-to-day running smooth. And while they're at it, they're answering to the Group Product Manager or Manager of Product Management, who's got an eye on the broader strategy, making sure everything fits into the big picture. It's a setup that values mentorship and oversight, ensuring nobody's paddling alone.

Example 2: The Full-Stack Maven

In this setup, the Senior Product Manager is the Swiss Army knife of the product world—a true full-stack maven who's juggling user stories, epics, the roadmap, not to mention the vision and strategy. It's a role that's less about churning out features and more about sculpting the product's big picture. As features do launch, it’s about this Sr. Product Manager building the use case to expand for new roles on the team to handle day-to-day KTLO and iterations for existing products. Expect this person to be your go-to for the broad strokes while the Group Product Manager or Manager of Product Management is focused on ensuring they align with the organization's overarching objectives.

Example 3: A Pair of Product Managers with Support

A pair of Product Managers working shoulder-to-shoulder, sharing an Associate Product Manager who's the glue in keeping their day-to-day product functioning and iterated. It's a structure where collaboration is key—no solo acts here. Both Product Managers are like co-pilots, with their hands on different parts of the controls, crafting a cohesive product story, possibly across many different feature sets. They lean on their shared Associate, who's juggling support duties, making sure nothing falls through the cracks while learning from two supervisors and increasing their surface area of knowledge. And above them, the Group Product Manager or Manager of Product Management keeps the mission on course, ensuring that the collective effort is more than just the sum of its parts. It's teamwork in its truest form, with a dash of mentorship and a bit of shared responsibility.

Example 3: The All-In

You’ve got the Director of Product Management up top, keeping an eye on the big picture and ensuring they build an environment for their teams to thrive. Their right-hand folks? The Group Product Managers or Managers of Product Management. Each one's running their own squad of Product Managers, with Analysts to dig into the details, and a Technical Product Manager who's all about navigating the technical landscape to align product development with current and emerging tech trends . Then there’s the Senior Product Manager, the one who's deep in the trenches, handling new feature build outs that has high risk and high reward. It's a setup where everyone’s got a specific part to play, and they're all zoned in on making the product valuable to the organization. A ton of teamwork, alignment on roadmaps, and ensure we prioritize across the teams so shared co-creators know where to focus.

This was a very memorable weekly newsletter for me, reminding me of all the various set ups I’ve been lucky to be a part of. There are multiple more options of how to set up your team, but wanted to ensure that the length of this newsletter didn’t get out of hand. My hope was to provide you with what some of the options out there look like so you can get a sense of what questions about structure if looking to start a new product job or consider other options if you are currently re-organizing your teams.

I hope you found this helpful!

Until Next week…

Jason @ Product Protégé

Product Team Blueprints