Find your role in a product company
We believe that behind every great product there is a great product team including a well-defined development team. So we’ve not only built a product that helps product teams to build products that users actually like, but we’ve structured our own team to get the most out of a high-performing product team. In the following, we’d like to give you a short intro into different roles and responsibilities on our team.
Agile product teams (vs. good old waterfall crews)
As for team structure, what makes an agile team different from good old waterfall crews?
We’ll try to keep our stance apolitical, so let us brief you on what we think an agile product team is responsible for.
In agile development, the product team is responsible for implementing strategy, building the roadmap, and defining product features. There is no one-size-fits-all structure. For example, you can organize your product team around the different products or product lines in your organization.
The product team brings together different functions that require a very specific set of skills. These functional parts of the product team should be able to self-organize so they can make decisions to get work done. Self-organization isn’t about disrespecting the organization, but rather about empowering the people closest to the work to do what’s needed to solve the problem.
Building our cross-functional team
We created a cross-functional, creative team, as our product team. Let me present members of this league:
As you can see, different teams at DevMads are organized around the product team that is responsible for StoriesOnBoard’s newest developments. The product team works in close collaboration with Marketing, Sales and Support, whereas Human Resources and Admin are areas that make sure the entire organisation runs smoothly.
DevMads is a small organization with 17 employees. We have now one product team that is flexible, responsive and has a high degree of autonomy.
Roles on our Product team
Product owner
Our Product Owner, Gergő, is a former marketing expert. He’s responsible for delivering the most value to our users and making sure development follows the company strategy. So basically, if you look into his mind you’ll find a box ring with business goals in one corner and user demands in the other.
He gives direction to engineers, UX designers and researchers on what to deliver. It’s key that the rest of the team trusts his judgement. The product owner should not only have a deep understanding of user needs, but also have a vision for the value the team is delivering to the customer. He also balances needs and wants of other stakeholders in the organization, such as sales and support team.
Responsibilities of the Product Owner
- Managing the backlog — This does not mean that they are the only ones adding new items to the backlog, but ultimately, they are responsible for the backlog that gets pushed to development.
- Release management — The sprint is not necessarily a release cycle, but instead sprints facilitate development planning. Ideally, the dev team delivers as often as they can so that during spring reviews they can review real customer feedback. It is usually up to the Product Owner when things should be delivered given its technical complexity.
- Stakeholder management — Any product will have many stakeholders involved ranging from users, customers, governance and organizational leadership. The product owner will have to work with all these people to effectively ensure that the development team is delivering value. That can mean a large amount of stakeholder management and communication.
Engineering team
Our dev team consists of 4 engineers, Kuli, Tomi, Roli, Zoli, who are responsible for creating the project deliverables, together with the rest of the team. The engineering team determines what is and what is not possible to deliver technically. They come up with creative solutions for user needs and their inclusion also makes it possible to set realistic timelines.
Developers use a practice called mobbing or mob programming, still a fairly new software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer.
Our engineering team is built on
- technical knowledge and skills,
- deep knowledge of the agile framework,
- excellent team work skills.
QA
QA tester, or quality assurance is a key role on our product team filled by Attila. He helps to review and analyze products for errors and bugs that could affect user experience. In an agile product team like ours, the goal of a QA includes continuously preventing defects and helping ship products faster, so Attila is involved throughout the whole development-delivery process.
UX designer
User experience is a critical aspect of a SaaS tool. We want our product to have a positive impact on emotions, attitudes, or behaviours of users, so user experience deserves special attention within the product team. This is where the UX designer comes into the picture. Our UX designer, Rami, works closely with engineers and helps to control the user experience by promoting usefulness, usability, desirability, and accessibility.
Responsibilities of the UX Designer include
- conducting research,
- building mind maps to perfect the user journey,
- creating wireframes, mockups, and prototypes,
- performing usability testing,
- and designing the user interface.
Researcher
Continuous discovery is a vital aspect of product development, even for such a small team. Market conditions, user habits, needs, competitors change constantly, so user research is never complete. Our researcher is a former developer, Kazi, who conducts user interviews on a regular basis. His contribution minimizes the risk of developing ineffective solutions, rather than relying on a pre-assembled backlog where the priorities might not always be the most relevant. Researchers bring a unique, curious and data-driven approach to understanding users and evaluating solutions to solve for their needs.
Responsibilities of the Researcher include
- planning research, collecting data, analysing it and presenting the insights gained,
- creating story maps of use cases and to plan new products/features.
Our researcher excels at
- communication skills,
- openness,
- team work skills.
Supporting roles in a product company
Product marketing
Since our users come from all over the world, it’s the job of the online marketer to find a way to reach this wide (yet narrow) audience. Our online marketing superheroine, Merci, is responsible for developing, implementing, and managing marketing campaigns that promote our product and write relevant content.
Responsibilities of the Product Marketer include
- researching the competitive landscape,
- creating and coordinating feature release communication, product launches,
- crafting positioning and messaging,
- running marketing campaigns,
- finding new channels to attract users.
Support
Support is the face and voice of the whole team and the product. Our online support team members, Ági, Dorina andZoli are very kind and constructive with users. They help them to find features and fix issues via chat as soon as possible — which is usually within 10 minutes in chat. They have another very important role, which is channeling feedback from our users to the entire team.
Our support team is built on
- emphaty,
- very-very good communication skills,
- knowledge of tools,
- basic technical knowledge.
Sales
Our sales team is made up of two enthusiastic members: Tomi and Olivér. They both have a good knowledge about both the product and methodologies that it is built on (story mapping). When they hold demos of the product to potential customers, they may need to know technical details or educate them on the methodology. The sales team is also responsible for key account management and nurturing leads in the pipeline.
demo the product, key account management
Our sales team is built on
- very-very good communication skills,
- knowledge of the tools,
- good knowledge of use cases and deep understanding of users.
