The term “agile” has become a symbol of efficiency, adaptability and collaboration in the software development world. Yet implementing agile methodologies means facing a range of challenges and nuanced considerations.
It’s not enough to follow a set of practices. Instead, it requires a deep understanding of team collaboration dynamics, the ability to be flexible with processes and the capacity to adapt to evolving demands.
A study published in the IEEE demonstrated that the essence of agility extends far beyond the adoption of any single methodology and depends more on the practices and organizational context used rather than rigidly adhering to specific methodologies.
Meanwhile, a study featured in Information and Software Technology underscored the importance of organizational and planning processes in cultivating a deep domain understanding within teams. The research advocated “broadening the lens” and “blurring boundaries” to encourage cross-functional collaboration, product ownership and team structure.
Together, these findings paint a picture of a feat that is both collective and individual — a reminder that the essence of fine-tuning a product team lies not in rigidity but in exploration, adaptation and continuous improvement.
Product leaders at Work & Co. and Endpoint Clinical revealed their unique approaches to optimizing their teams.
Healthtech company Endpoint Clinical provides interactive response technology systems and solutions to life sciences professionals.
Describe the makeup of your product team. What are some of the different roles and how do they support each other in the product development process?
Endpoint Clinical’s product development team is structured into two main groups: product engineering and product strategy. The strategy group consists of a product management group and a design group. Each team has its respective leadership and key contributors. Product management consists of product managers and product design has both user experience researchers and designers. These groups collaborate in an agile fashion to design our feature sets, build our backlog and manage the delivery cadence.
The engineering group consists of a testing, DevOps, architecture and a development team. Testing includes manual and automated testing teams to verify features, functions and concepts and then automate to cover future testing iterations and regression. The DevOps group manages all CICD processes and integrations with third-party tools for integrated SecOps. The architecture team provides core solutions, technical reviews and technology assessments. The engineering team is structured into a frontend team and a backend team. The frontend team manages our design system and frontend code while the backend team delivers core business services.
How is your product team structured? How does this approach help your product team perform at the highest level?
The team is structured to have product strategy define the ‘what’ and the product engineering team define the ‘how.’ The separation of these two teams, with close coordination, allows the strategy group to focus on building customer-centric functionality and the technical team to focus on the stability, reliability and best approach, including the technology selection to drive the feature set.
“The team is structured to have product strategy define the ‘what’ and the product engineering team define the ‘how.’”
Within each group, the feature breakdown allows for specialization in each vertical of the team. Automation and off-the-shelf tools are leveraged as much as possible to ensure that the design, requirements, initial delivery, feedback processes, deployment, security, development and testing processes are digitized, fluid and all connected via integrations.
Our teams operate on an agile process with four different SCRUM teams, each with a comprehensive unit — management, development, testing — with an oversight layer across all teams with the automation, architecture and DevOps team operating independently, helping support each delivery team. This setup allows for quality delivery within each unit and the ability to work on multiple components and features in parallel.
As your team grows, how do you evolve its structure to continue meeting the needs of the business and its customers?
Understanding our customers and business direction is key to planning our team structure. We receive continuous feedback from internal and external stakeholders that help us plan our growth opportunities and product roadmap. This enables us to forecast the size, composition and skill set needed to deliver and support our solutions. We couple this with a flexible staffing model that combines a blend of full-time employees and strategic partners to ensure that we can burst on demand with the right talent.
As our team has grown, we have slowly shifted from generalists to specialists in different areas of subject matter and technical expertise, helping drive quality solutions. To fully support our customers and business, units we also ensure we have geographic coverage of technical resources to maximize our delivery — “follow the sun” — and provide in-region delivery support. Our team structure has continually evolved depending on the company’s growth state. Being nimble with our delivery model and fluid with resourcing is important as our business has evolved over the last decade.
Work & Co is a technology and design partner for companies like Google, IKEA, Apple and more that defines and launches digital products.
Describe the makeup of your product team. What are some of the different roles and how do they support each other in the product development process?
Work & Co is focused on ideating and bringing digital experiences to market, and over the past ten years, we’ve launched hundreds of products ranging from e-commerce sites to mobile apps to AI tools. That experience has yielded learnings about the right way to unite the best product, design and technical talent to transform our clients’ businesses.
We partner closely with clients to bring new products to market or to redesign existing experiences. We effectively work as an extension of their organization, so we compose our team to support the end-to-end product lifecycle. Strategy, design and technology experts focus on the vision, KPIs and architecture. Additional designers conceptualize and visualize the product and understand user journeys. Developers and QA analysts build and test the product to bring it to life.
Product managers helm the engagement to ensure a cohesive vision and coordination across disciplines that we’re meeting and planning ahead for business, brand and operational objectives and hitting project milestones. The product manager coordinates and shapes the work, but each discipline’s expertise comes together to make a product great.
How is your product team structured? How does this approach help your product team perform at the highest level?
We know that understanding business and user problems and building successful products to solve those is challenging, so we over-index on deep experience. A Work & Co Partner is on every project, combining their extensive design, technology or product knowledge with industry expertise.
Our teams comprise an array of exposure, backgrounds and interests to drive an expansive vision and approach. We may create a project team where members have recently worked with clients in diverse industries such as financial services, healthcare or retail, so each can bring a unique perspective that isn’t readily apparent in a more siloed approach.
“Our teams comprise an array of exposure, backgrounds and interests to drive an expansive vision and approach.”
We prioritize collaboration and transparency. Our teams come together daily for an hour, each discipline representing different product lenses. These meetings provide a comprehensive view of the product from all angles as it evolves. We open up our files to share work in progress from the previous day. We try to limit further meetings and collaborate in real-time with tools like Figma and Slack to give team members the heads-down time they need, along with the feedback and inspiration to produce amazing work.
As your team grows, how do you evolve its structure to continue meeting the needs of the business and its customers?
As a design and development company, our product management team is focused on three main areas: product strategy, client management and project management. We are responsible for ensuring the product meets its goals and is a success for the client and the market.
Team sizes can vary, but the priority is to keep them focused. If a team feels too large, that indicates we need multiple work streams where each has a dedicated team — and perhaps a dedicated product manager for that workstream — with a focused set of goals. The makeup of these teams will stay similar as we scale: always cross-disciplinary, led by a product manager.
An important aspect of growing teams is onboarding, knowledge transfer, and communication.
Many people who don’t have a background on the product will join at various stages. Bringing new team members — or new clients and stakeholders — up to speed quickly and thoroughly is essential. We achieve this through a combination of onboarding sessions and team walkthroughs of designs and code repos, as well as adequate time for questions. This process will look the same if we are transitioning ownership of the product from our team to a client team, too.
