Product Bulb

Core part of a successful company is an empowered product team. A team which has ownership of solving business problems, and one that is accountable for the solution built and deployed. Every team, be it product, engineering, design, sales or marketing, has a product hat to play – meaning is the owner and is accountable for a specific part of the product building process. But product team is the one accountable for the ultimate business success or failure or the ‘meh’ result.

If your “product” team’s starting point is a list of projects, and from there on meetings are held with respective project teams for what features to build and when is the expected deliverable and ends with retros which consists of feedback on roadblocks or success factors for building the features, then you are working in a feature team, not a product team.

Product teams focus on problems to solve and value delivered to the customers as well as the business. Feature teams focus on projects to finish and features to deliver. Product teams take ownership of the business outcome, feature teams count the number of projects or features completed as their success metric.

The first internal role of a Product Manager is to inspire and influence action on the company’s vision, through their products. The internal stakeholders – engineering, design, marketing, sales – everyone has to be brought in on the vision of what you are trying to build, and who you building it for and what customer problem is it solving. When an engineer in your team is asked about what they are working on, they should be able to start from the business problem that they are aiming to solve. That’s the level of influence that a good product team can have.

Below is our infographic for you to distinguish between a Product team and a Feature team.