Product Org Design that Drives Impact

Welcome and Introductions

Rina Alexin | 00:00–01:17
everyone. As I mentioned, Tom and I are really, really excited about this topic. It’s one I hear over and over and over again when I talk to product leaders. What do we do about our product organization? And so here we are going to be talking about how to make the most out of your context at your company and drive impact no matter what product org you are in. So please
And I love this, Tom, I’m glad you’re game for it, but these webinars are going to be extra good if we get your questions. So make sure that it’s not just me and Tom talking, have the discussion, definitely put in where you’re calling in from so that we also get to know a bit about our audience here. here’s, look, there’s some people from calling in from DC and Iowa. Welcome everyone. Really glad you can make it.

Got London too, so somebody from across the ocean.

Good, good late afternoon for you. Awesome. Well, Tom, can you go to the next slide? So my name is Rina Alexin here just to moderate the real star of the show is Tom Evans. I’m calling in from Austin and so is Tom. Tom, what are

Yep.

Tom Evans | 01:17–01:51
Coincidentally, we are, yes.
We could almost be in the same room.

If we had the office to do it, right?

Absolutely. So Tom, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit?

Yeah, so Tom Evans, I have been with Productside for 15 years and have had a lot of fun working with companies across industries around the world. And one of the challenges that I have helped organizations with is organizational structure. And so happy to use my experience to be able to lead this webinar.

About Productside and Webinar Logistics

Rina Alexin | 01:51–04:26
Wonderful. And as I mentioned at the start for those tuning in, this is a topic I hear all the time in talking to product leaders. And we know that as product people, we can’t always influence or have a direct, I guess, decision on how our org is structured. But it’s a really, really important conversation because context matters for product work.
All right, so first I’m going to kick it off with just telling you all a little bit more about Productside. For those of you who are not familiar with us, we are an outcome driven product partner. What that means is when we partner with our clients, we care about their outcomes. We create not just training, we create full transformation programs that incorporates coaching, advisory, just a lot of custom work to get our

companies, the people who we work with from where they are today to where they want to go tomorrow. We tend to tailor our engagements to your context. find that high relevance is extremely important for ultimate business outcomes achieved from our engagements. And so we really pay a lot of attention and time to making sure that whenever we work with our clients, it’s really structured for them.

And it’s always led by one of our invested experts. Invested is the key word here because Tom and other team members are not just advisors from a third party. They really try to embed themselves as a member of your team and they care about your outcomes.

Rina Alexin (03:30.87)
Now, I also said it, we really, really love the engagement. Please ask questions. You can do it a number of ways. One easy way is just to call something out in the chat. And another way is to use that Q &A button and you can write in a question anonymously. We’ll be taking questions throughout this webinar. So if we find a question that is relevant, we’ll actually bring it in.

but of course we’ll also leave time for Q &A at the end. Right now I’m going to answer the most common question is, can I watch it later? And absolutely all attendees and registrants will be receiving a link to watch this recording after the webinar is over. We’ll also be hosting it, of course, on our website. So you can come and watch it later as well.

Rina Alexin | 04:26–05:10
Make sure to connect with us on LinkedIn. We have a, think one of the largest LinkedIn groups for product managers and product leaders. It’s a great place to share best practices and discuss important trending topics. I peruse it every now and then myself, and there’s always something new, some new comments and new articles posted there. So great resource in this group.
And make sure to join our newsletter. It’s a way to keep in touch with us at Productside. We share also trending articles, information, and you can also stay up to date with future webinars that we are hosting.

Why Org Design Matters for Product Impact

Rina Alexin | 05:10–06:59
All right, and now, Tom, I’ll kick it over to you.
All right, well, welcome everybody. And as you’re probably trying to read that Dilbert cartoon, one of the things that we often see is if companies don’t seem to be working in the way, aren’t achieving the goals that they want to, it seems like reorg is the way to do it. Or if all of a sudden there’s a successful company out there that is following a certain.

organizational pattern and everyone all of sudden jumps on and says, that’s the way that we ought to be organized. And so, know, reorgs are an important strategic decision for an organization, but also they shouldn’t be done in a reactive manner just because whatever is currently working isn’t working. And so we want to walk through and talk about organizational models. And as we do this,

we’re actually gonna break it out into three areas. First, talking about reporting structures, different types of organizational models. And then we’re gonna talk about operating models, which really starts to get down a little bit more into the team level. And as we go through these, recognize that even though we’re talking about them discreetly here in terms of these three topics, there’s really a lot of interdependence there. so, once you’ve a decision you make in one area may impact

a decision in the rest of the model area that you’re looking at. And then what we’d want to do at the end is summarize with talking about what are some key guidelines to success to be able to work in reality, whatever organizational model that we are given. So why do we care? Well, it impacts us as product managers or product management leaders. And so our ability to be effective in an organization

Symptoms of Organizational Dysfunction

Tom Evans | 06:59–09:25
is influenced by the organizational model. The organizational model aligns how we are able to align ourselves and our work with other stakeholders in the organization. It impacts cross team collaboration. And one of the things, I’ll probably jump into the conclusion there a little bit, but in reality, it shouldn’t impact it, but it does. It’s just the nature of the beast is,
the way that we organize impacts how we collaborate across different teams. It also defines who gets to make decisions and who gets to do the prioritization. And I think what’s really relevant for us is organizational models can impact our career growth and our opportunity to grow into product management leaders. Now, there are some symptoms here that teams will…

typically are experiencing because they are facing challenges in organizational models. And so we have a poll here. We want to ask you which of these are you experiencing? And you can answer multiple of those. So select multiple of those. And I’ll talk through it a little bit. Of course, role confusion is one that I see very clearly because it’s not always clear what a product manager should be doing and where that lines of responsibility ends.

I see sometimes where someone feels like a product or they’re doing that somebody else is doing their work, but really the biggest problem I find is they’re doing everybody, product manager feels like they’re doing everybody else’s work. right, inconsistent process. I don’t have to really talk about that one. Siloed teams to where because of the way you’re organized, you don’t get as much interaction across different parts of the organization.

the cross-functional teams, which we just talked about a little bit, the inefficient decision-making. So it’s who actually owns the decision. One of the studies that I’ve read in terms of successful projects that are accomplished is the successful projects have a clear decision-making model in place and they make decisions quickly. But if we don’t have, if our…

Tom Evans | 09:25–11:32
Organizational design doesn’t allow us to make decisions quickly. We’re often waiting for weeks, maybe even months, for some critical decisions to be made. This also results in how resources get aligned in the organization. And are you able to move resources appropriately to support the most important goals for the organization? Trying to stick to an organizational model gets in the way of scaling.
And I think as we go on here, I think you’ll see that as we start to scale, the reality is we have to change organizational models. Breakdown in communications related to the siloed, but definitely organization models impact that. And then that last one is low morale. And a lot of that, I think, has to do with, do we feel like we are connected into the rest of the organization?

Do we feel like the work that we are doing actually impacts the rest of the organization? So what gave you plenty of time to answer that? I’m gonna go ahead and stop this and share the results. let’s see what number one on the list, role confusion. And Rina, think, you you and I have talked about this. I don’t think that’s a surprise in any way at all around role confusion. Number two, inconsistent processes. Again,

I think that is a clear, I’m working with a client right now and while they have some process in place, it ends up that it’s not required to be used across the organization. And that is creating some challenges for them in that, they end up having inconsistent processes in place. Siloed teams, I’m gonna stop at that one. You can see all the rest of them, but siloed teams is definitely an issue that I’ve experienced.

experience to where you felt like as soon as you organized in a certain way, you got disconnected from other parts of the organization. other thoughts that you want to share on that?

Reporting Structures: Who PMs Report To and Why It Matters

Rina Alexin | 11:32–13:21
Tom, I’m actually not surprised as well to see that all of these have been selected. And this is why this topic keeps coming up and it’s so important. And I also think this is why a lot of companies choose to think the answer to their problems is reorganization. But we never asked, right? We never asked the participants here how your organization is organized. These come up no matter
how your organization is organized. so restructuring the organization is not necessarily the answer.

Yep. All right, well, let’s go ahead and close that one out and get into that question about reporting structure. So now we’re going to go to the question that you mentioned, Rina, is how does your product manage or where does your product management report in the organization? And so, you know, three different or four, different options here.

And so do you have somebody who’s like a VP of product or CPO that has a seat? And what we mean when we say that is they have a seat out there at the executive team level. Or do you report up through engineering? Do you report to somebody who is a general manager and that’s somebody who owns all of the cross-functional team that reports up to them and they’re typically responsible for P &L for a business unit is typically the way that we look at it.

Do you report up to marketing? And are there some other, any other ones that you might be reporting up to? So let’s see here. I’m gonna give this just another five seconds or so to let everybody be able to put a response in there.

Rina Alexin | 13:21–15:30
Yeah, and similarly, Tom, I think we hear issues or problems with org design no matter what the reporting structure is. So again, it’s more of like just being curious right now in terms of our audience, what is the current reporting structure?
Okay. So we have the large, it’s not even a majority, the answer with the greatest response is up to a product leader. So that’s 35 % of the respondents. It seems to, it is pretty equal around the engineering VP, a general manager, or sorry. And then the marketing is just a little bit higher. So the top one picked here was product leader.

The next one was marketing at 20 % and then general manager and engineering VP, 15 % each. And then there are others. And I’d be curious if whoever selected other, if you might put into the chat window, just stating what that other might be. But I’m gonna share with you some, I’m not gonna need to say statistics, but I’m gonna share some trends here in just a moment.

in terms of what we see in terms of these different types of reporting structures. But here’s the point, and Rina Alexin’s already made this point, and I just really want to double emphasize it, is product management rarely has an opportunity to choose or maybe even define what that reporting structure looks like. Every reporting structure has some pros and cons around it, and we’re going to talk about that here in a few minutes.

But here’s the important thing. And Rina shared an article with me last night, which was really, really good. And it emphasized this last point is that your organizational structure has to be adjusted to align to whatever your key business strategy is. And so as organizations change their overall business strategy, there’s gonna have to be some organizational realignment to do that. And so it’s really, that’s one of the key decisions that

Tom Evans | 15:30–17:45
the top executive, the CEO gets to drive in an organization. And so really our goal is learning how that we best work no matter what organizational structure or reporting structure that we end up with. So this is why I say I have some trends. I don’t have specific statistics because the numbers aren’t fully aligned. There’s no, what I would say official report on this.
But one of the things that I have clearly seen as I’ve worked with organizations and the data points this out too, is that the reporting up through a C level product leader is the strongest trend that we see in terms of reporting structures. Now reporting through an engineering or CTO tends to be the second most common one. And then that reporting up to the gist

Business GM or to the marketing or CMO tends to be the ones lower on that list. And it was interesting to see that we actually had marketing show up a little bit higher in the results. I think the rest of this aligned pretty well, but marketing showed up higher in the result. And if you look at the, go ahead.

And Tyler has asked the question about the product org. think it sounds like Tyler, you’re in a situation where the VP of product reports into the CMO. So the question was that that’s similar in other orgs. And I think we’re going to get into it, but essentially the organizational structure has to reflect, like Tom just said, the business strategy. So in certain organizations, it may very well make sense for a product to report into marketing. So we’ll cover that.

We’ll talk about that here in just a second. And one of the things is, I remember early in my work with Productside, we had a slide where we talked a little bit about the history of product management. And if you look at it, especially in the technology industry, it originally was reporting up through engineering. And then you started to see the trend saying, well, we really need to be market facing, let’s report through marketing. And I think it’s in the last,

Trends and Pros/Cons of Reporting Models

Tom Evans | 17:45–20:12
at least probably about 15 years where we started to see a stronger presence of the chief product officer and seeing more and more organizations report up through the chief product officer. So what might be some situations where you might choose these different reporting structures? So let’s look at the chief product officer. I would say I see this mostly in tech oriented type companies though not exclusively. I’ve worked with other
industry where they do have a chief product officer. But I think a big part of it is that they have a large portfolio that they feel like has to have a good story around it. And if I don’t have a chief product officer who can own the mix of products that we are going to bring out, you start to lose some of that synergy, some of that coordination, some of that, you know, full strategic fulfillment without having that.

chief product officer in place. Engineering, I’d be curious on your experience of it, but the places of where you’re probably more likely to report up through engineering is where the technology, the depth of the technology and the complexity of the technology is a key driver for the product offering. And so yes, being close to the market is always important, but there’s a lot of technology complexity.

technological complexity might move you into that direction of reporting up through engineering. Marketing, probably a little more oriented into consumer oriented products. And so you see that there. And I will say the first two, maybe three, actually first three roles that I had in product management were reporting up through marketing.

And that was, would say, before we started to see the prominence of a chief product officer in organizations. But I’ll give you some examples of where marketing might make sense. And I’ve worked with some telco companies. And if you start looking at telcos, especially on the consumer side, often marketing owns that, what I’m going to call that consumer relationship.

Tom Evans | 20:12–21:29
they may own a specific market segment. And then they have products that are supporting those particular market segments. And so in a case like that where the market segment or the marketing is leading the market segment and you have products that are specifically aligned to that, there could definitely be a case of where you’re reporting more up toward a marketing part of the organization. Now, go ahead.
I’m curious, does the role of the product manager change depending on your reporting structure? Is the core mission of the role change?

I’m gonna say, do you want me to talk the reality of what happens?

Yes, the reality and

So my perspective is no, it should not change because what we do as a product manager is a, know, those principles are important no matter what kind of product, you know, reporting structure you’re in. Does it change? Yes, it does. It has, this reporting structure does have some influence on that. And so I think one of the things that we want to be able to do is

Tom Evans | 21:29–23:06
And this is one of the things we teach in our class is yes, all of you are facing struggles in terms of people understanding your role. We have now armed you with the knowledge and the language that you need to be able to go back and start presenting what your role really should be in the organization. So I think, yes, the structure drives that role. It shouldn’t. And part of our mission here is to make sure everyone can
Understand, here’s what my role really should look like.

Yeah, I want you to kind of go over, I think in the next slide, we’re going to share, you know, what these structures might be best for. But then I want to take Martin’s very curious question here in chat.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the last one I was gonna say is business general manager. I think somebody there, Matt, in the insurance industry talked about, really it was the head of the business and yes, insurance, financial services. Those are definitely ones where I see more of a business general manager. And those work really well where that part of the organization, it has its own P &L and…

and you’re not necessarily sharing different, well, you could be sharing customers, but you have a clear directive around what your offering is. And it doesn’t have lot of inter, it doesn’t have dependencies on other parts of the product software. So, well, let’s talk about that, the reporting pros and cons. And so some of this, think I’ve touched on already, but one of the…

Tom Evans | 23:06–25:18
you know, positives here of having product leadership leading it is that it helps make sure everything is aligned strategically, that all of the products fit into the strategy of the organization, and that there’s clear ownership around product success. But here’s the other part that is really important is when I have a clear product leadership or led organization,
my opportunities for career development are gonna be much better focused on. So if I’m reporting up to a general manager, I may not feel that career development focus nearly as much as I would having a strong product leader. Now, of course, it does have that risk of helping to create silos, but we’re gonna talk about all of those here in a little bit.

How about the engineering lead? Well, I think, you we talked about where there was a lot of technical complexity, maybe there was some delivery risk. It does open up that opportunity for much closer collaboration with the technical teams. Now, should you always be working closely with the technical teams? Absolutely. But like we said, organizational structure will drive behaviors. And so if you need to have that tighter relationship,

This is where that focus can be. But what we see as a challenge then is that sometimes engineering will look at you as an aid to them versus you are the customer expert. You’re the market expert. You’re bringing in that customer expertise. And so we can easily start losing that customer focus.

in a marketing lead. So this is where I mentioned the telco example of what, if you really look at a lot of the consumer oriented telco products, a lot of it is about the go-to-market strategy. It’s about positioning that product in the marketplace and acquiring and retaining those customers. And so that’s where, yes, it makes sense for a product to lead up to them, but you also want to make sure that they don’t.

Tom Evans | 25:18–26:49
lose and underestimate the value of what product is actually there to do. And I’ve definitely seen that behavior result where product is just about delivering. We do all the rest of it. And I want us to be able to make sure that we step away from part of that challenge. Business general manager. So the benefit there is that you do have a direct link to
Profit and lost, you’re gonna be working with someone who is clearly very outcome focused. But on the downside of this is where they may not have nearly as strong a focus or expectation around the discipline of product management, making sure you get the right practices in place. And then finally is being able to help support you in your career development. So those are some of the.

pros and cons there of each of those.

So let’s just wrap up this and then we’ll go back to some of the questions. so here’s the key point that I wanna leave behind is that regardless of these organizational models, if you have an effective leader of product management, they are doing these five things. And I had a conversation with a colleague a number of years ago and we talked about why would you ever wanna be report up?

Okay, go ahead.

The Reality of Product Management Across Different Structures

Tom Evans | 26:49–29:10
All right, that was my perspective. Why would I wanna report it through engineering? And he goes, well, one of my best product management leaders was through engineering. But it was because they did these things right here. They understood the value of the product management role. They were making sure that the work that was being done aligned to the strategy of the organization. They were great at creating that cross functional collaboration. And that was clear.
you know, who got to make the decision. So those are, you know, really important aspects of it. And one of my roles where I was reporting through marketing, the marketing leader didn’t understand product management. And so there were some pros for me in that I could do whatever I wanted, but I didn’t feel like I had a good voice at the table during that time period. that, you know, that’s just another example of that importance of them understanding that role. All right, Rhian, sorry, you had a…

Yeah, so I did want to make a comment here because we’re getting just a couple, you know, questions from some of the folks. So one is I heard somebody, well, somebody wrote a comment about reporting into sales and the confusion around the product manager role in their company. And I did want to make a point here that I think that the tension between product management and sales is

results a lot because of the different timelines, the two different, can I call them functional areas, are supposed to be thinking about, right? Product management is supposed to serve the business’s long-term interest by really understanding the market and providing value to that market in a way that accrues to the business over time. Whereas sales oftentimes has a much shorter, you know, what is my quota this month, this quarter?

And that tension can be healthy for many companies, but most of the time, especially if you’re reporting into sales, you lose the long-term aspect of product management. And it is actually over a longer period of time, extremely harmful for that company. I will say that there are, I think there’s probably a lot of challenges in that kind of reporting structure.

Rina Alexin | 29:10–30:49
And it is definitely not an easy uphill. It’s an uphill battle to try to explain the role of product management and the value of product management, but it is possible. I mean, we do do that. And then I don’t know if you want to share anything about reporting into sales or I would love to get to Martin’s question.
I think I’ve seen that just a little bit. I haven’t seen that often, but it falls along the point that you mentioned already, Rina, is that, and especially in their case, is that they’re seen as a support for the sales team. So it’s almost like being a sales engineer versus really driving the long-term focus of the product. But the other is you can become very reactive in supporting to close deals versus to…

Think about the long-term focus of the organization.

Exactly and that is, you know, I think we call it essentially a feature team in a way of sales. Then it’s basically solo clients deciding what they want without really necessarily understanding what they need.

And the other thing is, and this could be the case, is that I do know that in some organizations where the product managers sit in a region, so there’s a central office that makes the products, then they have product managers sitting in a region. In that case, you will see the product manager be a little more sales-driven, sales support, but that shouldn’t be their only.

Rina Alexin | 30:49–33:46
Is that your, mean when they are responsible for configuring a product line for that region? It’s a in that way.
Yeah, yeah, but it also can be very much a sales support role is what it can turn into. Yeah.

Okay, I do want to get to Martin’s questions. I think it’s very interesting. And he asked, what is the most customer need and benefit driven one from your perspective?

Yeah, so this I refer back to the article that you you mentioned last night, Arena, because it taught, you know, one of the clear messages of that was is it depends. So if part of your strategy is to create an integrated experience, you know, which Apple has taken, that’s a different type of organizational structure.

versus if we want to make sure that all of our products are aligned to specific market segments and supporting those particular market segments, that’s gonna drive a different organizational structure. And so that’s where the general manager model might be the best model because they’re close to the customer, they’re focused on delivering value for that customer. But if you look at it across the organization, you’re not gonna deliver a single integrated experience.

Tom Evans (32:06.67)
I think those are several of the different questions that you need to consider when you think about that customer need and the benefit to them.

Yeah, and I’ll be sharing, since we’ve brought it up a few times, just that article was really good. So I’ll share it to the group here as well.

Okay. All right. Was there any? All right, I’m gonna keep going here and if there’s any other there, just let me know. All right, so organizational models. in general, excuse me, we look at centralized versus decentralized. And another great Dilbert cartoon that you might wanna look at here, you know, we’ve got to decentralize to remove the bottlenecks. We got to centralize to be more efficient.

And that really kind of is the quandary that organizationals run into is that if I’m trying to create a strong centralized experience, if I want to make sure that we’re operating as efficiently as we possibly can, we might lean toward that centralized type model where if I need to make sure that my organization is able to respond fast,

then I might lead more into a decentralized. And then you can get a, and I guess really, you’re never gonna see a company of totally one way or the other. There’s always gonna be mixtures of these happening in the organization, but there’s definitely that opportunity for a hybrid model. So I think I talked about some of the pros and cons already here.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Models

Tom Evans | 33:46–35:57
But when you’re looking to have that consistency of execution across the organization, when you wanna make sure the decisions are being made to align to an overall strategy, that’s gonna be one of the benefits of the centralized organization. But we do recognize that it does cause slower decision-maker, especially if there’s an expectation on decision rights.
to have decisions move up and down through the chain. For decentralized, there we go, is this at speed and that agility of response. But this is the other side. And this is where I have seen issues in decentralized organization is that the practices become very fragmented and each team is operating in their own way.

even if you try to say there’s a standard way for doing it, it doesn’t happen. And the second one is that duplication of effort. And I was working with one organization and that was one of the big goals of why I would say they moved to this hybrid model is that they had a central product organization that had the big picture vision of the organization. They put the operating models in place.

with the processes and role definitions because they wanted to achieve that consistency of practices and good practices across the organization. But also they wanted to have somebody who had a whole view of the portfolio and be able to start identifying where there were synergies and where there was redundancy in work being done. And they were identifying lots of redundant opportunities and work that was going on.

once they started to put that hybrid model in place. But it takes a strong leader in that product organization. And some of us may call that a product operations group. And product operations has other expectations around them, but definitely this would fall into that definition of a product operations type group.

Operating Models: Squads, Trios, and Teams

Rina Alexin | 35:57–37:18
Yeah, and I’m seeing, think Benjamin had chimed in earlier, it sounds like he’s in his company, they follow more of a hybrid function or a hybrid organization where there isn’t a common reporting structure. And to your point on the cons on unclear accountability, decision rights, that can cause a lot of friction in terms of actually making decisions well. can also cause, I would say confusion in the career aspect as well that you had mentioned, Tom, around.
Well, if it’s not really a standard, then it could be ad hoc. So then how does somebody grow professionally in this kind of organization?

Mm-hmm.

Okay, the last part we’re gonna talk about are operating models. And so here is our next poll. Which of these operating models does your team use? And if you’re not familiar with a term, you know, don’t worry about it. Pick the one that you think best aligns to who your organizational model or your operating model. And this is really about how a team is at a team level is organized and how the teams

work together.

Rina Alexin | 37:18–42:08
All right, I think we’ll keep it over just.
Yeah, a little bit here. So maybe what I’ll do here is I’ll jump ahead and talk about, know, we’ll keep the poll open. I’m going to move on here to the next slide because some of you might be asking that question. So squads, this has been Spotify or been popularized by Spotify and where it’s a small autonomous cross-functional team. So everybody that needs to be working together to deliver a slice of value for the product.

Yeah, go ahead.

Tom Evans (37:50.45)
is working together. A leadership trio is situation where you’re probably more functionally aligned, but you make it really clear that there is this team that is responsible to work together for the success of the product. And that typically is going to be product manager and engineering lead and somebody from your design or user experience part of the organization.

Feature teams, so these are teams that are delivering features that are part of an overall product. And I would say that is a fairly common way that I see organizations of large, especially large software products, organizers around feature teams that are responsible for just that feature. A component team tends to get down into things that are a little bit more technical.

And so they’re part of the overall infrastructure such as APIs would be a great example of having component teams. Platform teams, this is where they’re creating a product that serves multiple other products. So one of my organizations I worked with, and this was in financial services and their client was an internal one, but one of the things that they were wanting to better manage is the call processing.

And so they were working on a platform that was using AI to be able to bring it as calls come in, they could do some voice recognition and make sure that the call was being routed in the right way. And that wasn’t just for one part of the organization that was actually covering other parts of the organization. Or if you look at some of what Microsoft has done over the past.

is when they first brought together Microsoft Office, and some of us may remember this, why they called it a suite, it wasn’t a suite that worked together very well. And so part of what they wanted to do is to create some commonality in what that experience was. so making sure that the search, making sure that all of the commands, the different menus all had that same look and feel.

Tom Evans (40:09.76)
And so that’s something that you might look at in terms of a platform team. And then the program team is really more for larger type situations. And I definitely see this in large financial services organizations, maybe telcos too, where you need to have people from across the organization working together in a coordinated manner. And while I know some of my colleagues hate the word safe,

this is probably one of those situations where a company ends up using something like SAFE. So, I walked through all of those. We had a chance to talk about that. And interestingly enough, we have 31 % that say they operate in program teams and 31 % say they operate within platform teams. And there’s a very small number that works in squads.

Oops, sorry, I’m not sharing the results. Let me share those results, sorry about that. So there’s just a small number that work in these more cross-functional type teams and be there like the squad or the trio. So I’m gonna say this actually surprises me, cause I would have expected feature teams to be a little bit higher. I might have expected a little bit more up there around squads.

Yeah, I’m, however, not surprised because it sounds like based on some of the comments and questions we’re getting, there’s a lot of people here who are working at larger organizations. And I will also call out, I do think that the reason why our colleagues do not like SAFE is how it’s implemented in organizations is really waterfall masquerading.

It is, it’s truly not agile, but it ends up sometimes being the reality of how these organizations have to work.

Choosing the Right Model for Your Context

Rina Alexin | 42:08–43:30
And I think that’s what you’re always going to hear, by the way, for those tuning in from us is, yes, is there an ideal? There is, but there’s also the very, very clear reality of how companies organize, how they work and to be effective in reality is, is I think the goal of any product manager. In any case, over to you.
And these that I, which might be best for you, we’ve really kind of already talked about those. so, you know, and this is again, goes back to the point of where you, there’s not the perfect model. Every model has its pros, every models has its con, and you have to take the one that you think best aligns to what’s important from the goal of the organization.

and strategy of the organization and work within that.

And a lot of that has to do with also how you are delivering your products out to your market in terms of, you know, I think that is the underlying the business strategy. Right now, Tom, I do want to say, and you know, I’ve seen this now so many times that a company, I will say in the last five years, I’ve even seen it more often will constantly be restructuring. Have you seen this where they go from centralized to decentralized to centralized to decentralized?

organization.

Tom Evans | 43:30–46:20
You know, I won’t say I’ve seen that a lot recently. I feel like earlier in my career, I experienced that a little bit more. And I do know back in the late 90s and early 2000s, and this was when Dell was really dominating the market with their direct to market sales. And that was the business model that was working the best is that they were growing so quickly.
They were organizing, think, reorganizing every six months. And it may not always been at the business unit type level, but it was definitely down at the team level that they were constantly going through reorganizations.

Tom Evans (44:15.98)
I get into your questions. I think back when I was in sales, we felt that a little bit more, where the sales teams was focused, we were organized one way and then we went back to another way. And so sales organizations, I think may have a little bit more, what I wanna say flux in how they get organized. So what do we do? Okay, sorry, where’s that?

No, I just wanted to call out, saw Willem here did point out that he has seen the constant reorg. It’s not just me. And then Eric, I see your question. We’ll get to it in Q &A.

So here we are, so many decisions, so many options to work with and what are we to do? Well, this is the point that we were really emphasizing from the beginning is we have to work within the organization that we have, but there are best practices to help us do that. One is getting that clarity in roles. So we saw that big problem in clarity in roles.

but not just in the roles because the roles talk about the responsibilities and the task and you would define those by a racy sometimes. But the other one is decisions, right? Who actually owns a decision? And if it’s not clear who owns the decision, you lose a lot of time in decision-making because either nobody wants to make the decision or everybody thinks they own the decision.

And that’s something that you can define through a DACI, D-A-C-I, is ways. And so both of those are useful in setting up that clarity. Cross-functional collaboration. So yes, your organization may not be organized in a way such as squads that allow you to automatically be within the cross-functional team. But one of the things that we have to do as a product manager is,

Guidelines for Success in Any Org Design

Tom Evans | 46:20–48:02
make that effort to be cross-functional, to collaborate cross-functionally with other organizations and maybe even be the one to help drive some of the patterns and rhythms in place that create that cross-functional collaboration. As a product manager, you never are going to have all the resources that you need to have to execute on your product or you’re never gonna have.
control, direct control of all the resources that you need to have to achieve your product goals. And so this is where being able to influence without authority is critical. And that doesn’t matter whether you’re a junior PM or you are the chief product officer. Those, that ability to influence other stakeholders is going to be critical. Be able to create a shared language of success and

And this gets into making sure that everyone that you’re working with in that cross-functional team knows the goal. They know the vision. They know the outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. And then take advantage of the strengths of the structure. Don’t look at it and say, isn’t the best organizational structure. It has some strengths. So figure out why the organization made the decision to do that. And then,

make sure to go and fix the, or take advantage of the strengths of that organization. So we got one more poll that we want to end with. And I’m gonna advance that slide in just a moment here.

Poll: What Matters Most to You?

Tom Evans | 48:02–49:16
All right, so that last poll, of those five things that we talked about, which guidelines for success will have the biggest impact for you? And this is again, multiple choice. So you can choose one of these, but let us know where you think you can best benefit from what we talked about.
I notice you don’t say reorg.

Yeah, we didn’t offer that one because that’s kind of the challenge that we’re running into anyway.

Exactly. Well, while that is up, why don’t we actually take Eric Stevenson’s question and then I’ll see there’s a couple more coming in. what is the best model for an industrial manufacturing company? What do you think, Tom?

my goodness. It really comes down to the business strategy and the business model that you’re working with. and what I have seen, well, let me put it this way. If you have products that align to and support a single industry and they have a single go-to-market model,

Applying Org Models to Industry Contexts

Tom Evans | 49:16–49:45
you might lean toward a more of a business, a general manager type role. But if I have products that cross multiple market segments and maybe even multiple business models in terms of how they are sold, pick one. That’s what I’m not gonna be, you know, really say, but I do see that the
Yeah.

Tom Evans | 49:45–50:05
Most of those tend to be aligned by product categories and then your sales teams can cross across any of those product categories. That’s kind of the general direction I see. Without having the whole context, I really hate to push that any further.
It really

Rina Alexin | 50:05–51:41
Well, I would just say that, yeah, it’s about first asking a couple of questions about how are your products delivered. are you delivered to specific segments and have a suite of products for that segment? And it would be more in that way. I think the functional roll up is less common, though I would say that some companies probably operate more in that hybrid of having functional leadership.
and then organizationally by the business unit, as Tom is kind of saying.

Yeah, because you have manufacturing, the manufacturing may be manufacturing one product, they may be manufacturing multiple products, sales teams, they be selling one line of product or they may be selling multiple. So a lot of things we have to understand before.

Right. And let’s not forget, Tom, that a lot of even industrial manufacturing companies, also have digital components now of their products, which would have a very also different life cycle and need a different structure there, too.

Yeah. All right. Why don’t we show the poll results here? So the number one, and this doesn’t surprise us based upon the discussion that we had at the beginning was the role clarity and decision rise. So that definitely sits up there. And then everything else was pretty equal. Everything else at 27%, the cross-functional collaboration, leveraging data for influence, shared language of success, and leveraging the strength of the structure.

Final Takeaways and Closing Remarks

Tom Evans | 51:41–54:01
Okay, well, let’s go into my last slide and then I guess we can go into the wrap up here. But you know, the end of it is, is that there’s not one magical way to go and create an organizational structure. And I will admit that through my experience in working with different organizational structures, I probably found myself in several times saying this is my preference, this is my preference, but
The context is so important is what is the context of the organization, especially around the business strategy and how can the organization best organize to support that. So it’s not the magic is not in the organizational structure, at least for us, it’s making sure that these other principles that we’ve talked about are things that we execute on.

Tom Evans (52:36.13)
All right, let’s go on, let you present your slides and.

So for those of you who are familiar with Productside, a lot of the topics that we covered today, while we don’t necessarily go too in depth on org design in our optimal product management class, it is a great way to learn product management and I would say avoid the role confusion aspect of what we’re hearing today.

to address those things of being able to align teams around outcomes, influence without authority.

All of it will help you be a better product manager at your organization. And we actually have a in-person class coming up in just a few weeks in New York. And one actually coming up in Austin in December led by Tom here. So I may even come and join that one, Tom. cool. Yeah. And we have an upcoming webinar.

It’s going to be in a few weeks, but Kenny and I will be talking about how product managers can 10x and really 100x the role with AI. The first part is a discussion on whether or not product management may be the future bottleneck at organizations and how to, I will say, avoid the build trap that may come with AI.

Rina Alexin | 54:01–55:53
So that will be held on Tuesday, November 4th at 11 Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern. Please join and you can register using the keyword code there. And I think we also want to just share our upcoming courses. We have an AI product management course coming up with Roger. Kenny is also going to be teaching an optimal product management course live online, so not an in-person course in November.
and you have another one in December. So make sure to find out more by looking up that QR code that’s visible on your screen as well. All right, let me get into the Q &A. So here’s a, we have a couple of questions, a little bit more, I will say, technical. Someone asked, how do you handle a mix of program teams and squads? So in an organization that has both.

Yeah, I would love to say, I guess maybe I need a clarifying question here is, are you as a product manager working with both of those? Or are you just working with one or the other?

I’m not sure we’re gonna be able to get the answer to that, but I, yeah, that’s a good clarification because I would find it really hard if they’re on both because that definitely like.

I would think that would be really difficult. I think the main thing that I would look at is, you know, remember these squads are about small cross-functional teams that can be very dynamic and reactive. And the program teams are all about being able to manage large scale projects and the coordination across those. And so it feels to me that if a

Tom Evans | 55:53–58:00
organization is organized that way is because one set of projects products lend themselves much better to the dynamic.
Okay, we have an answer. Yeah, we have actually an answer. So actually it’s a little different. the probe, it’s where the program defines a strategy in the day-to-day execution as a squad.

The day-to-day execution, that’s inert.

That doesn’t make sense to me either. Different aspects of product management are done by two different teams. Maybe that’s what this is.

Yeah, yeah, because that’s

Tom Evans (56:24.78)
Yeah, I mean, I understand the overall planning and coordination, but a squad should be owning a slice of value from end to end.

Yeah, let’s I’m going to encourage you to reach out to both Tom and I on LinkedIn and we can maybe have a chat there because I think we’re gonna be able to get an answer. What’s an example of owning a slice of the product versus focusing on delivering features? I think that’s something that you mentioned. So just getting clear on the definitions.

Yeah, so what I think of a slice of value is you own from the user experience all the way down to the technical implementation and the connection to the backend systems. And you will see companies, and I’m making a guess here with someone like a Google, but definitely with an Amazon, where somebody owns a slice of value. And that may just be the checkout.

of the purchase. And that’s the whole thing that they own and their team works cross functionally to be able to own that. Somebody else may be owning the, you know, the sorting or the prioritization of what’s presented on the slides. Another may own, how do we go and create different categories of products and what information needs to be around that? That’s a slice of value.

And, but you own it from the user experience all the way down to the data infrastructure.

Rina Alexin | 58:00–59:06
Thank you, Tom. And I think we have just one more question, and not entirely related to our org webinar, but I think we should answer it anyway. And that is, how do we get people who are not in the actual teams to realize safe is a pain?
I could take that one.

Yeah, I go back to my statement of while safe is not an ideal model. I’ve worked with several different organizations to where the reality was the only way to manage the large scale projects that they were doing was through safe. So.

Yeah, would run, honestly, it’s going to be really hard because somebody in your organization, higher up, is deciding that this is the way that they want to organize. Maybe they brought in a big four consulting firm that told them this is the answer. It can very well work. Now, it is often a bit of a broken process. But I would run some retros.

Rina Alexin | 59:06–62:06
understand what value was it meant to deliver and where are the Roblox delivering it? Is it in, let’s say, a really long annual planning process that makes it really hard to even understand what value you’re delivering? Is it a lot of pressure on just deliver, deliver, deliver? There’s just a lot of things that can go wrong in this really complex system. So doing a retro on a team, I think is the first step I would take.
All right, I think we are at time and Tom, I want to thank you for sharing your wisdom here. We went over just about every single possible reporting and organizational structure. If you still have questions for us, please connect with us. Tom and I are both available on LinkedIn and apparently our emails are pretty easy to find as well. So message.Productside.com.

So I know we’re going to be happy to talk to you. Until next time, let’s do product better together. And thank you for joining us.

All right, thank you.