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This is a simple concept, yet I struggle to find teams that follow it. The idea is that when planning, discovering and inevitably building a software product, you need to have your Tech lead, Product Manager and Product Designer working closely together.
A beautiful thing happens when you get a strong relationship between these three roles and I have experienced this a few times. But sadly it is harder to come by than it should be.
Let’s break it down into the roles:
Your Product Manager is an intricate role that is still mostly misunderstood. But they are the ones who help teams prioritise what to build through a series of validation and research to ensure that what is inevitably built is wanted and needed by customers while ensuring an ROI for the business. They obsess with solving problems with an outcome mindset for the company. Importantly for me, they are the champions of creating iterations of constant feedback loops through the tracking of data and the performance of what is being delivered to customers.
Your Product Designer is responsible for being the voice of the user and customer. They need to ensure that what is built is intuitive, solves the problems identified and oversees the design of the User Interface(make sure it looks good & acts correctly). Not a small feat, and plays a significant role in the success of achieving desired outcomes.
And finally your Tech Lead. The engineer, the builder, the solution architect. They are responsible for ensuring that the tech being built, actually does what it's meant to. But above this, especially in small companies, they are also responsible for system safety, security, reliability and managing the releases of the software. And sadly, I have seen too often how the tech team are either not utilised properly, are not brought close enough to the problem solving conversation or the opposite where they have been given too much power.
It’s important, these three roles are brought close together. That there is a balance of power and understanding of what goals, objectives and problems the company is trying to solve. When given the agency and accountability, the tripod can become a force to reckon with.
Team anti-patterns to look out for that don’t adhere to this way of work.
The anti-patterns that I have generally experienced, but there are many more.
- Feature creep or shifting goalposts
- Teams just becoming ‘Feature factories’
- Tech debt build up
- Delayed delivery of projects and missed deadlines
- A mismatch of requirements to solutions
- Mediocre solutions to problems
- Missed KPI’s or OKR’s
- Team burnout and low morale
This is a big reason why I take a people first approach in building the environment that allows for this.
If you would like to discuss how I can help bring your team together, please reach out using the form below.
