A colleague asked for my advice about standing up the first product team at his startup. Even though I’ve received no details about what his company is working on, I know the history of the founders and can make some assumptions about the next-gen sandbox they’re playing in. That informs my recommendations for his team. Here is the thread.
How do we structure our team?
Startup CTO: We are looking to build out our product team for a new consumer app. It’s a fairly novel interaction concept and involves some deep tech. I can’t go into too much detail, but right now it’s at the ideation stage and we need the right team to bring this to market. So my question is… how would you structure your team for this? What would be your recommendations and are there any roles that overlap given we are fairly resource constrained?
HP: Who do you currently have on the team? What’s the state of the proof of concept? Is there already a business model?
Startup CTO: Great questions! We currently have the CEO who runs investor relations and operations, me (CTO), a chief scientist, a computer vision engineer, and a video processing engineer. As you can see we are seriously missing some product skills.
We currently have a product for business and pro sports teams. It’s an SDK that’s currently a yearly subscription. For the consumer product, we don’t have a proof of concept yet, but ran some basic surveys that are pointing towards a strong opportunity. We‘ve done business modeling around a monthly app subscription. If we do go down this consumer app approach, I want to make sure we build a team and culture that is customer focused.
HP: That’s awesome that the existing team is heavy on the machine learning and innovation side. At this early stage, hire generalists over specialists, preferably those who have strong networks to help you recruit and seek advice. Implementation team structure typically looks like this.
- Product Manager: Should have experience building products and business from scratch, customer and behavioral research, experiment driven, and knows how to define measurable outcomes.
- Designer: UI focused, prototyping skills, system thinker. I’d prioritize these skills over strategy.
- Software Engineers: I don’t know if you can leverage the existing engineers on the team, but you ideally need three, a good balance between frontend and backend. At my previous startup, we didn’t make good progress until the third engineer was added to the team. Three just seems like the sweet spot.
Sometimes you can find overlapping skills in product and design. That’s fine. They will complement each other. If you can get a “full stack” designer who is strong in research, a Jack-of-Many-Trades, then you might not need the product manager, at least from a bootstrap point of view. A good product manager can drive focus, build a customer focused culture, and prioritize bets to arrive at business outcomes. In a startup, some of these things come from different team members. Depending on the personalities on the team, sometimes this is fine. Other times it creates a situation where no one knows what to focus on first. But I listed the roles here, so you’re aware of the trade offs.
I did not include a researcher, because I think design and product should know or learn how to do that on their own. It makes them better strategic thinkers.
Startup CTO: This is super helpful and will absolutely put us on the right trajectory to hire the right people. Also, if you don’t mind I will keep you updated on how we progress over the next 6 months.
HP: Feel free to reach out. I don’t know anything about your product but as a product manager, I would look for opportunities to leverage features and data between the B&B and B&C.
Startup CTO: Do you have any good books or articles on how to design that team for design thinking and practicing system thinking? Need to make sure we can correctly identify these individuals when they come in for interviews.
HP: Nothing comes to mind, but I’d try to look for is someone who understands interaction as stimulus and response, because working with AI is about designing novel interactions to train the model. This is hard to explain but I like designers and product people who think like researchers.
Should we consider an agency?
Startup CTO: What are you thoughts on hiring an agency like Designit or Cooper?
HP: I’ve heard good things about Cooper. I haven’t worked with Designit. At GoPro we had used Odopod with good results. I worked with them to design the preliminary post-capture MVP experience for the Fusion camera, but I had a clear idea of direction since we had conducted research and have built some functional prototypes on our own. We understood the constraints and we had a point of view on the first bets we wanted to make.
At the time, I knew I wouldn’t be around to see that project through, so I purposely drove the direction of the design to force the team to ask questions about trade offs in technology constraints and how it might impact user experience.
Hiring a design agency to do discovery is very expensive. Before you hire an agency it’s helpful to capture the following:
- Define assumptions and questions about your target customer, biz model, and technology application.
- Define assumptions about the possibilities and constraints about the technology you’re developing.
- Define assumptions about the context of when and how your customers will use your product.
- Define risks and what you as a team believe might be the next big bet.
- Set a goal for 3 months, then 6 months. What do you hope to achieve within the next 6 months? From my experience, if teams don’t make some tangible progress within 6 months, doubt will set in and there will be a hit on team morale. Startups are fueled by passion so morale is very important.
You can do this by loosely following the process detailed in Sprint by Jake Knapp. The goal for you as the primary stakeholders is to align on the key unknowns you’re going to chase after. Perhaps some direction towards the first big bet. The more definition you have the better your engagement with the agency will be.
The point of going through the steps above isn’t to get to product requirements or a product vision. You can try. The process will inevitably yield ideas for solutions. The point is to mob on assumptions that will lead the way to better questions and bets you’re making as a company. Perhaps get your engineers to answer some of the questions by building quick and dirty prototypes. The more clarity you have around the problem you’re trying to solve, the more value you’ll get from your engagement with the agency.
When I worked with an agency, I had a running list of assumptions and dependencies. You’ll find that as you ideate and design solutions, it’s easy to get sucked in to the ratholes of unknowns. When you get here, brainstorm the unknowns and identify key questions. Ask yourself, “What assumptions would you bet on to move forward?” Then the team can decide how to test these assumptions. I bring this up so that you can make the most of your time with an agency. Your goal with the agency is to arrive at an MVP and a little beyond. This becomes the first story you will tell about your product.
Startup CTO: Ha, I can’t say thank you enough. This is above and beyond what I was expecting!! Super helpful. You know you really should write medium articles and then just forward them to people like me when we ask.
