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Do you believe in data-driven product development?
Are you motivated to create products that your customers love?
I’m guessing most of you answered yes to all three of those questions.
Let me ask you a different set of questions.
How many engineers does your company have?
What about product managers?
User experience designers and user researchers?
How about data analysts?
At most companies, there aren’t enough product managers, user experience designers, user researchers, or data analysts to go around.
Engineering to product management ratios are often 20 to 1.
Product managers support several teams across different platforms, regions, or product lines.
User experience designer and user researcher ratios are often much worse.
Data analysts tend to be even more scarce.
Engineering teams have to share resources.
This leads to technology-first solutions that underperform because they aren’t useful or usable.
What does this say about our values?
If we value user experiences design, why are our UX teams under-resourced? – Tweet This
If we value products that customers love, why don’t we hire more product managers so they can spend more time with our customers?
If we value data-driven product decisions, why don’t we hire more data analysts?
The Ideal Product Development Team
My dream product team includes 3-5 engineers, 1 product manager, 1 user experience designer, 1 visual designer, 1 user researcher, and 1 data analyst.
That’s 8-10 people which is a little large.
The ideal product team values product discovery, user experience design, research, and data analysis as much as it values engineering. – Tweet This
It can vary somewhat from product to product. But it’s a good starting point.
If the product doesn’t involve a traditional user interface (say a search crawler or an API), then I can do without a user experience designer or a visual designer.
However, I still want a product manager, a user researcher, and a data analyst.
Or if you have a well-designed visual style guide that your team knows how to implement, you might be able to get away with a part-time visual designer.
But treat each of these decisions like the shortcuts that they are.
It’s About Roles Not Job Titles
A senior person might play more than one role.
A designer might be able to cover user experience and visual design.
A product manager might be able to do user research.
This helps bring down the headcount.
But you need to be smart about how and when you double up roles.
First, I wouldn’t want someone with fewer than 8-10 years of experience playing multiple roles.
I’ve never been of the mindset that you need to do your time or work your way up. But I developed this rule of thumb from experience.
Eight to ten years allows you to develop the depth needed in each role and the maturity to know how and when to context-shift between the two.
Before that, most people compromise one or the other. I know I did. You don’t want that.
Second, you have to be honest about how much of each type of work your product requires.
If you are entering a new market with a brand new product, you want a full-time, dedicated user researcher. Even if your product manager has excellent user research skills.
There is simply too much work for one person to do.
If you are an early-stage startup pre-product launch, an engineer can play the role of data analyst as there won’t be much data in the beginning.
Be strategic about where you double up roles. Match the investment to what the task requires. – Tweet This
A Final Word
I’m sure this reads like I’m an unreasonable idealist. And maybe I am.
But take a minute and consider that it might read that way because product management and user experience are nascent fields.
We’ve underinvested in both for decades.
Our norm is to have engineering-heavy companies.
But just because we’ve always done it that way, doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it.
It’s easy to say we are user-centered and data-driven. Take a minute and look around.
What does the makeup of your product team say about what your company values? – Tweet This
Do you agree that we should move toward more balanced product development teams?
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I fully agree with you on that. Great article.
The reason why I think many companies, especially startups, tend to be understaffed in product management, user experience and data analysis is often that these are considered non-productive positions for which it is hard to get budgets for, especially when finances are tight. The other reason I think is that product leader often don’t have as much political capital as seasoned CTO and VP Engineerings have, mostly coming from the fact that they have much larger teams that report into them and are therefore seen as being more “powerful”.
My hope is that as product management becomes more scientific and outcome-driven, executives will start to understand that their traditional way of think may not be the most effective way to build products users love.
Daniel, thanks for your comment. I think you are spot on.
Product and UX will be undervalued as long as leadership teams think building products is as simple as just having ideas. The more we can redefine the work to be less about having “good” ideas and more about being systematic about how we invest resources, the more we’ll see teams balance out.
I’ve been a Product Manager for over 15 years and I recently joined a company (~18 months ago) where I am the first PM in the history of the company. And you’re absolutely correct the company was in the ‘if we build it they will come’ mode and most of the new products where ‘ideas’ introduced by either the founder or other members of senior management. It’s been an interesting road here and I can say that slowly buy surely there is real evidence that the idea of doing true ‘product discovery’ with emphasis on framing, prototyping & testing, and then planning for delivery is really starting to resonate.
That’s great, Richard! Helping a team make that transition is not easy.
Teresa, the role sharing and paring you mentioned provides a means of making your ideal team composition a viable reality. As Daniel pointed out, some people view UX and product as “non-productive positions”. To some extent, they’re right to do so! Some of these “resources” will be somewhat idle, depending on the particular state of the product at any particular time. The team needs to have some flexibility in where its emphasis is – and who plays what role – as needs vary within the product lifecycle, an iteration, or an experiment.
Roger, I agree. For me it’s less about having all of these full time roles on the team and more about having access to these roles as they are needed. Most companies aren’t anywhere close to that because they share these roles across far too many teams.
Teresa, you agree with Roger and so do I. The resource needs vary depending on the product life-cycle and often companies are short of some kind of pm resources. I think the problem here in the north Europe at least is partly because companies don’t want to use external resources for those tasks. It is easy to hire externals to code or even do UI/UX design but when it comes understanding your customers or making strategic decisions about your features using external help is mostly no-no. Do you see the same challenge in US and what is your take on that? Would you be willing to use externals for data analysis or other product mangement related stuff?
Harri, I think this is exactly why this is a values question. If a company values product development as a strategic differentiator, then it needs to develop internal resources. If it views product development as an operational role, than it can probably get away with outsourcing it. It’s not about what’s the right or wrong team design. The question is, does your team team design reflect your values? And if not, the company might need to question whether or not they are living by those values.