A Group is a cross-functional unit led by a Group Product Manager alongside one or more Engineering Managers.
Groups consist of:
Groups are oriented around a set of customer problems (“missions”). Those missions are not fixed or even exclusive; there might be times when multiple Groups are attacking the same problem. That’s both acceptable and (on the margin) expected.
As the team has grown, it has become increasingly difficult to communicate and collaborate, both within the Product team and across teams.
Previous versions of our Product organization could rely on organic communications and interactions to disseminate knowledge within the Product team, but we’re starting to see evidence that this kind of ad-hoc communication is becoming more difficult.
While I believe that what we’ve been doing is still working at the moment, I don’t see that being the case a few months from now. The kind of communication that got us here won’t get us to where we want to go.
A variation of this communication problem is that it has become harder to collaborate across teams. As we’ve grown, It has been “easier” to stay siloed within our respective functional units. This is often a second-order effect of a “The [X] team doesn’t listen” sentiment spreading.
This reorganization addresses that sub-issue. Since folks across teams will work and mix within individual Groups, we will preemptively prevent the spread of the harmful sentiment above in addition to getting more people involved in problem-solving to inform better resource allocation.
The end state we’re striving for is “highly aligned, loosely coupled”.
When it comes to how we work with Engineering, we’re going to further integrate engineering managers into Group rituals, with the intent of bringing them closer to the customer and reducing the time to resolution for any issues related to PM <> Engineering interactions.
There are no immediate implications related to working with teams outside of EPD, but we’ll look toward further cross-functional integration over time. Our current-best idea is to work with leaders of other teams to define time-bound tours of duty for select members of their team to help set a specific project up for success. This would be some non-negligible amount of their capacity as defined in collaboration with the leader). These team members would indirectly report to the Group PM for the duration of the tour.