How do you structure your Product team? How big is it, what does everyone do? How do you measure success of each function/person?

My current product team has about 40 PMs (And we are hiring!). I would not dive into what each of the team does, but maybe talk about how we went about structuring it, which may be a more transferable skill. When I first joined Meta my VP asked me if the current team structure is the right one. Naturally, I did not know the answer. Frankly, I don’t think it was the right question for me to answer at the time. Instead, I engaged with the team on setting a 3 year plan - Write down what our strateg ...Read More

Across companies, I’ve structured teams in two different ways: By job to be done (JTBD) or domain. For me, this structure has made sense when there is a clear ideal customer profile (ICP) or primary customer segment that the company is actively prioritizing. That ICP may (for example) be defined by their industry, what they sell/offer, the geography in which they operate, and/or their size and maturity as a company. Inherent Internal alignment on customer needs allows me to hire for functional a ...Read More

My current product team consists of four direct reports who are all senior product managers. My job as a director is to create distinct areas of responsibility (AoRs) for these PMs to deeply understand customer problems, conduct discovery and research with their design and engineering (tech lead) peers, scope and propose initiatives, and then greenlight them to go on the roadmap only when we have sufficiently reduced the level of ambiguity that we know how such initiatives will move the needle o ...Read More

Classic product management answer: it depends! If you are talking about structuring a team of product managers, I've led teams where PMs were part of a cross-functional team dedicated to a specific product or PMs that were more platform focused. One thing that I always want to make sure of is that my Product Managers is that they have end to end responsibility for a product or feature. PMs are measured by the outcomes that they achieve and not by their outputs. I therefore measure PMs by the des ...Read More

There is no one-size-fits-all structure for product teams as organizations have different setups based on their needs, maturity, customer segments and nature of products & services offered. Also fast growing companies often go through restructuring every 6 months with fluid org structures. Having said that, the question can be broken down into 2 aspects:  Product org setup within the company: There are different variations of this: Independent product org: Product managers report into a Chie ...Read More

I have PMs who work on both horizontal objectives across the organization (e.g., observability, security across all products) and responsible for certain product verticals (e.g., the product/feature we sell).  Most of my 10 member team is responsible for solving a customer problem through their product vertical. I have one PM responsible for a horizontal objective, though each of the others are also responsible for certain horizontals. Success is measured both in terms of the quarterly goals the ...Read More

Here’s how my product team is structured and how it works: Team makeup: We’re about a dozen PMs. I manage the team alongside one other people manager; the rest are ICs with clearly defined focus areas. Some are more technical, others more business minded. I think having both is the key to a well-rounded team. We hype each other up: Every other week, each PM fills out a shared update: industry news, customer insights, release status, and data points worth sharing. Then we present and discuss, sha ...Read More

I have led different sizes of product teams and single product teams or multiple product teams within an org. My philosophy is to structure a team to make ownership and decision making very clear; I use the MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) framework to reduce as many inter-team dependencies as possible. How do I do this? It depends on the type of team I'm leading. For example - for customer facing products that my company sells, I first separate teams by the product on which th ...Read More