Scaling a product team

A guide for building capacity while growing your team’s credibility as a driver of business value

Presented by Eric Ulken

INTRODUCTION

Say you have a small news product team that includes a product manager, a designer and a developer or two – or maybe it’s just you and some part-time allies from other departments. You’ve hit your stride, building valuable solutions for users and working across disciplines to connect the dots on business-critical initiatives. But you feel you’ve hit a wall.

If you’re building news products, especially in a small organization or as part of a growing one, you are likely to reach a point of imbalance, where the business imperative to deliver new functionality outstrips your ability to do so.

How will you know when you’re at that point? Some signs it's time to grow your product team:

Your backlog gets longer and longer, with important initiatives left on the table every month. (This suggests a gap in development capacity.)
You’re barely able to handle stakeholders’ tactical needs, to say nothing of building and executing on a long-term business strategy. (This suggests a gap in product management capacity.)
You struggle to define a roadmap more than a quarter out, or deliver promised functionality on time, because you can’t gauge development capacity. (This suggests a gap in project management capacity or process.)
When you do release new functionality, it often falls flat in the market due to inadequate user testing or having solved the wrong problem. (This suggests a gap in user experience research and/or design capacity.)

You’ve no doubt already proved your worth to your organization through the initiatives you’ve tackled successfully, but there’s more value you can unlock if given the chance.

IN PRACTICE

Use the tips and concepts in this section to cultivate a product culture in your newsroom

Make the case for investment

Start by doing the math: Show the gap between your current capability and your proposed capability with investment. Then show the expected return on investment that comes with closing that gap. Start with available data and document your assumptions, but don’t worry about precision — ballpark figures that illustrate an opportunity are better than nothing. And, even if it takes longer, it is wise to use the successes that emerge from the creation of each new position as fuel to fund the next, allowing your team to grow organically.

Define roles and structure

In smaller organizations, product manager(s), designer(s) and developer(s) will likely report to a single manager. In a larger company there might be a separate development team, for example. No matter what the formal org chart looks like, it is important to assemble small, empowered teams – usually consisting of a product manager, a designer and one or more developers – around specific product opportunities. These might or might not be existing lines of business: For example, you probably wouldn’t think of the article template as a business, but it is not uncommon to see it treated as a product unto itself.

Scale your process

Small product teams can function with a single decider, who manages a unified backlog and prioritizes all initiatives against one another. This practice will become a bottleneck as a team and the demands on it grow. Empowering individual product managers to own the development backlog within their defined product areas and allocating resources at a high level among these areas is a way to ensure granular prioritization decisions are made by those closest to the problem. With this freedom comes the imperative for product managers to continually monitor and report on the outcomes of their work.

Building the product-led organization

Many top-performing organizations benefit from being product-led – a condition when, as often as not, cross-functional priorities and demands originate with the product team, which may be better positioned and incentivized to see the big picture. How do you make an organization product-led? By insisting on data informed decision-making, practicing customer intimacy and engaging in proactive internal product communication that celebrates failures as well as successes

TERMS

Definitions for product terms referenced in this guide are sourced from NPA’s crowd-sourced product glossary

Assumptions [new term]

Unknowns that must be true in order for an effort to succeed. For any key assumption, the product manager’s goal should be to test it as quickly and cheaply as possible through market research, user testing, A/B testing or other means.

Backlog

A list of the bug fixes, new features, changes to current features, systematic overhauls, or other development items a team is working on. These are often prioritized internally based on needs or resources.

Return on investment, ROI [new term]

A ratio measure of the net income resulting from a given investment, used in order to decide whether or not to undertake an investment (projected ROI) or evaluate its success (actual ROI). For example, if a given feature is expected to yield $1,000 in sponsorship revenue in the first year but will cost $800 to build, its projected first-year ROI is (1000 – 800) / 800 = 25%. (More on ROI calculation)

Product owner

The person responsible for a product’s vision and direction. The product owner makes sure the work that is being done aligns with needs of the intended product audience, and may work with a product manager to prioritize and groom backlog items.

Stakeholder

The people with interest in or who may be affected by a product’s outcome. Stakeholders may be internal and cross-departmental (e.g. editorial, marketing, development, etc.), and external (e.g. product audience/user base).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Ulken

Eric Ulken is product director for content capabilities at Gannett, where he leads a small team of product managers focused on growing the business impact of the company’s journalism. A veteran digital editor and product leader, he has helped local news organizations across the United States find and serve audiences on digital platforms as a coach in the Table Stakes program. He previously worked in editorial and product leadership roles at The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times.