(2019-08-29) Cagan Product Vs Feature Teams

Martin Cagan: Product vs. Feature Teams. In the tech world, there are really three distinct types of, loosely speaking, “product teams.

The most common in terms of sheer numbers are not really product teams at all, they are delivery teams.

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.

..what I’ll continue to call here as product teams. Specifically, 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. The purpose of a product team in this sense is to solve problems in ways our customers love, yet work for our business.

In this article, I will refer to this third class of teams as feature teams. (Feature Factory)

Features, and occasionally projects. Usually provided to the team in the form of a prioritized list that is called the roadmap.

Recall that in product there are always four risks...

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 work 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 (management) that requested the feature on the roadmap.

It’s worth pointing out that even though the stakeholder is the one implicitly responsible for value and viability, they will still find a way to blame you and your team if their hoped-for results are not realized.

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

These feature teams will often think they are doing product discovery, but really it’s just design and maybe a little usability testing.

But there are other consequences of the feature team on the product manager role.

The result is that in feature teams, the product manager role is mainly project manager, and partly (unskilled) designer.

I can tell you that with few exceptions, the best product teams at the best companies are all about the empowered product team model.

Countless companies today realize the futility of the delivery team model, and they know they need to transform into a true, technology-powered product company, yet they think they can “check that box” by making the superficial changes to move to these feature teams.