AMA: Adobe Senior Director of Product Management, 3D Category, Nicolas Liatti on Building a Product Management Team

The business KPI are extremely important, and often forgotten by product teams.

The purpose is not always to have as many users as possible, the purpose is before everything to make business impact. And hence this is what product teams should always have in mind.

What do the sales look like, how are they growing week after week, etc. are very important KPI for a product team.

I really believe in 2 things:

• Conway's law, which state that any product is architectured in the same way as the company is organized

• A product is the reflection of the team

It's hence super important to organize your team in the way your customers will experience your product. I like for example to have someone overseeing all the features / products of the group to make sure there is a consistent experience, along with having dedicated PMs per functions / product.

Setting up the right culture is what matters the most, rather than the numbers of product managers.

Product Management is a function, and you can find that other people in the team are actually taking care of tasks and scope even if there is no dedicated product manager. It's hence super critical to work on the culture and how you want to build products with engineers, designs, etc., as they will be the best help when you will actually need to hire more product managers.

I believe the most efficient teams are usually 10 people maximum, including engineers / design and PM.

So I like to have 1 PM for 7-8 engineers + 1 designer, to make a team of 10 people maximum.

This is not a strict ratio to respect, sometimes it can be a bit less or a bit more, but by experience this has worked well for me.

If by CX you mean Customer Experience, then by experience I value them to be in the same team as PMs.

One of the secret for great products is to look for collapsing the stack, have closer relationships between all the functions. Having customer support close to the product teams helps to make sure that PMs are always close to customer problems, but also ensure faster resolution.

There is definitely an overlap between User Research and PM, and I think it depends on the size of the company and organization also. If you have the chance to get a great User Research function, use it so that PMs can focus on something else. Having a User Research function allows to make way more customer interviews. PMs should definitely participate to some of them, but not necessarily all of them.