This is one from the department of rhetorical questions. Of course you know the answer to this. Don’t you?

I once spent a few months consulting with a company that had a very strict definition of a product team:

4 developers, 2 QAs, half of a Scrum Master & 1 Product Owner.

(I was never very clear on which half of the Scrum Master each team got.) 

There’s an obvious problem here - and it’s not the lack of designers, researchers or any other specific role. The problem is that this team was never set up to deliver a product.  The most you could hope for with a team defined in terms of technical and delivery skills is working code, with a nice interface, deployed to production.

That’s not a product. (Or a Service, but that’s a discussion for another day.)   

It’s part of a product.  Obviously, you can’t have a  digital product without it being accessible to people.  But simply making it available is only a piece of the job.

I had a revelation about this while watching Jeff Patton give his keynote at MtP Engage in 2018 - which led me to a simple summary of what a Product Team is.  

A Product Team is a group of people who can:

1. Ask a question

2. Get an answer

3. Understand that answer

4. And take action based on that understanding

Anything less just doesn’t cut it.

That doesn’t mean that everyone involved in the team needs to use Jira. Or attend daily standups. Or observe any of the traditional ceremonies that the core development team might use to further their processes.

It does mean, however, that they share the understanding of the objective that you’re all, collectively, trying to achieve.  That you all share the same prioritisation and commitment to getting it done. And that everyone needed to achieve the four requirements understands that they’re on the same team, and feeds back to each other on a regular basis.

Line management isn’t a key component - Marketing, Sales, & Support do not need to change their reporting lines to work collaboratively with a dev team. 

There’s no fixed way to achieve this kind of collaboration - no model fits all organisations. Don’t try to force it. But the next time you hit a roadblock, look around the (virtual) room and ask if the team has what they need to fit the working definition of a product team.

Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash