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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • 5. What we know and what we don't
        • Part II. The role of the product managr
          • Chapter 6. Bad product manager archetypes
          • Chapter 7. A great product manager
          • Chapter 8. The product manager career path
          • icon picker
            Chapter 9. Organising your teams
        • Part III. Strategy
          • Chapter 10. What is strategy?
          • Chapter 11. Strategic gaps
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
Book summaries
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Chapter 9. Organising your teams
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Chapter 9. Organising your teams

Companies tend to organize in three main ways: value streams, features, and technical components.
Keep the product strategy and the goal-oriented nature.
In addition to these things, we also look at the value streams of the organization.
A value stream is all of the activities needed to deliver value to the customer. That includes the processes, from discovering the problem, setting the goals, and conceiving of the idea, to delivering the actual product or service. Every organization should strive to optimize this flow in order to get value out the door faster to customers. To do that, it makes sense to organize your teams around the value stream. How do you organize this way? First you begin with the customer or user—whomever is consuming your product at the end of the day. What is the value that you are providing them? Then work backward. What are the touchpoints they have with your company on the way to receiving that value? Having identified these, how do you organize to optimize and streamline that journey for them? How do you optimize to provide more value, faster?
Many companies are confused by the word product. You say product and people think of an app, a feature, or an interface. If you think back to our diagram on the value exchange in Figure 1-1, products are vehicles for value. So, if your app, interface, or feature is not inherently adding value on its own, it’s just a piece of the entire product. That doesn’t mean no one needs to manage it. It just means you have to look beyond just that piece to understand how to manage for value delivery and creation.
Consider an insurance company. The products for an insurance company are what they sell to customers: car insurance, home insurance, life insurance, and so on. I buy car insurance because it provides me with peace of mind in case I get into an accident—that’s value. Having an iPhone app that allows you to manage your car insurance, for example, is only a piece of that product’s value stream. That app can help get me more information on my insurance policy or find options if I get in an accident. This functionality is valuable to me, but the app on its own is not enough value. I still need the car insurance product.
You can still have a product manager owning that iPhone app’s experience, but you must make sure that they are part of the larger division that holds the true value—the car insurance division. This structure makes it possible to set strategy at the division level, with the product manager able to execute on product initiatives that tie to their product.
As your company scales to include more products, you will need more levels of management to effectively oversee the various areas. However, you don’t want to overdo it. Having the right number of levels also has a large impact on your strategy (which we’ll talk about in the next section). By minimizing the number of layers and by giving product managers more scope over their product areas, you can effectively create a product organization with a structure that supports the product strategy.
You can’t build an organizational structure without a product vision, because the value streams are not apparent.
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