Supercharging product teams: Principles for Transformation

I was having coffee with a product leader in a growing SaaS company — an old client that was now in a new role, wrestling with a business unit made up of designers, product managers and engineers. He was complaining about misalignment between teams, not moving fast enough, and sluggish customer growth.

It’s a common story, and elevating your product team’s effectiveness involves a strategic shift in mindset and approach. Here’s a deeper dive into five transformative principles, with examples of how you can supercharge your product teams.

Organize Around the Customer

Traditional department-centric structures often lead to disjointed customer experiences. By reorganizing your teams around the customer lifecycle, you can create a more coherent journey. For example a team solely focused on onboarding, ensuring new users have a seamless introduction to your product. Implement cross-functional squads that include members from engineering, marketing, customer support, etc — each focused on specific customer-related goals like reducing churn rate or improving satisfaction scores. This approach transforms each team into a microcosm of the company, dedicated to a specific part of the customer journey.

How can team structures more closely reflect the customer journey? Are there gaps in the experience that could be addressed with this reframe?

Data is not “someone else’s job”

Data should not be solely owned by analysts. Product Managers and Designers need to understand how to analyze data in order to interpret it and connect it to user insights and opportunities.

In a high-performing product team, every member should understand and utilize data in decision-making. Regular data literacy workshops and involving all roles in data-driven processes can help. For example, creating templates and frameworks for product managers to present data-backed rationales for proposals and designers interpreting user behavior data to inform changes.

This democratization of data is seen in Lean Startup methods and leads to more objective decisions, aligned with user needs and market trends. How can you work with your data science team to make data more accessible and comprehensible to all team members?

Celebrate Business Metrics, Not Feature Drops

It’s great to acknowledge when you ship a new feature or campaign, but don’t lose sight of KPIs like acquisition, retention, churn, etc. This reframes business milestones for your teams and aligns them to what really matters.

Identify goals for your teams that include specific, quantifiable outcomes that align with business objectives. Using and socializing business dashboards to track KPIs like user retention rates or ARPU, and celebrating these achievements, shifts the emphasis from completing work to achieving outcomes. The downstream effects show up in the project work, where teams have a better top-level view and are more effective at selling work up to leadership.

Design Meaningful Alignment Rituals

There’s a tendency to slog through planning and roadmaps as if its business-as-usual. Create stakeholder alignment rituals with purpose and intention — even when obstacles arise, nothing keeps the train moving like shared goals.

Beyond planning, alignment rituals should build a shared vision and understanding of goals. Involving team members in OKR setting sessions to discuss strategic objectives and reinforcing the company’s mission can make these rituals more engaging and meaningful. This not only sets goals but also builds a sense of purpose and direction, prompting you to think about how these rituals can be more engaging and reinforce broader strategic goals. I wrote about the power of rituals here.

Acquisition is the Start of the Customer Journey, Not the End

Acquiring new customers costs more than nurturing existing ones. While there are certain business strategies that focus on pure acquisition, it risks creating an overly sales-focused growth platform. In contract, a clear strategy for nurturing customers creates great CX and a strong, sustainble product-focused culture.

Think about how you are structuring your projects and teams — do you have dedicated work focused on KPIs for customer retention and referrals?

By embracing these principles, you can set the stage for a transformation of your product design business unit. This not only reshapes your product experience — but also your operating structure, collaboration models and ways of working. When utilizing these principles, teams can operate more efficiently, improving speed-to-market, creating more opportunity for innovation, while acheiving the business growth metrics that really matter.

If you could use help with improving your business KPIs through a strategic shift in your organization’s ways of working, I can help. Drop me a note at jon@jonsukarangsan.com