How to get a highly effective product development team

… and PO’s role in it

Bojan Spasić

Structure of this talk

• Team types and team structures overview (really loose definition of ”team”)

• Push towards highly effective product development teams (and what PO has to do with that)

When “team” is not just a word

Product Development Team Genealogy …

“One Man Band”

{ … }{ … }

“Ad-hoc flat team”

{ … }

{ | | }

| |

{ … }

“Specialized team members”

“Parallelized specialization”

“Collaborative specialization”

{ … }

{ | | }

{ … }

| |

{ … }

“Feature-focused teams” (prioritized)

Feature focused{ … }

{ … }

{ | | }

{ … } { … }

| |

{ … }

“Outcome/Impact-focused teams”

{ … }

{ | | }

{ … } { … }

| |

{ … }

OUTPUT OUTCOME

Allow the team to make that last step

LET’S EXPLORE IDEAS!

• Have a clearly defined and understood direction• Clearly communicate and agree on goals• Develop roadmap (with options) and make it

transparent

NO OR UNCLEAR DIRECTION

• Define how to measure desired outcome• Share all outcome measurements and feedback

(customer surveys, success indicators) with the team

NO MEASUREMENTS

• Favor outcome instead - output without desired outcome doesn’t mean much

• Emphasize the value of outcome• Reward reaching desired outcomes instead

FAVOR OUTPUT OVER OUTCOME

• Don’t celebrate (just) deliveries• Celebrate desired outcomes

CELEBRATE WRONG THINGS

NOT HAVING PO RETROSPECTIVES

• Improvement opportunity by reflecting on the recent experience

• Reflect on the actual outcome

NO EXPERIMENTATION

• Encourage early experimentation to (in)validate options

• Allow failures on individual features, i.e. fail feature to produce value

• Avoid upfront work (fully defined specifications, designs etc.)

• Discourage specializations (e.g. “UX work is ready”)

• Encourage full involvement of the whole team in product definition

CULTURE OF HANDOFFS

NO TRIMMING OF FEATURES

• Allow feature removal• Allow for feature optimization (“downscale”)• # of features is not measure of product value or its

usability

CHASING SHINY OBJECTS

• Keep the focus on valuable increments• Don’t make “quick detours” to get “quick wins”

(HINT: avoid team tetris)

Thank you!