When was the last time you sent a Slack, ordered through Grubhub, or organized a meeting in Google Calendar? All these digital products were designed by tech companies to make your life easier, but they couldn’t have succeeded in doing so without efficient product management processes.
Product management is vital to any growing business. In many respects, it’s the core reason the business exists: strategically developing, launching, and continually improving products for customers to purchase. As you might imagine, the success of a product management team very often translates to the success of the business — which means that, as a company scales its product, so too does it scale its product teams. What do these periods of rapid growth mean for the internal organization of individuals in such key positions?
Built In spoke to Shampa Roy, a product manager at fast-growing software company Lob, to understand better how the structure of her product team has evolved over time.
Lob automates direct mail marketing and address verification at scale, simplifying these processes for businesses while improving accuracy and giving them greater flexibility and visibility of offline communications and data.
How big is your product management team, and how is it structured?
Lob’s product team consists of seven product managers, two directors of product and a director of product design. We’ve recently restructured so different pods of product managers each work with a director of product. We’ve looking for more product managers and product designers to join the team right now.
How has that structure changed during your time at the company?
When I joined, there was a small pod of product managers working under our group product manager, with everyone else reporting up to the head of product. The team was actively looking for directors to help manage the growing team. Now that they are here, we have reorganized based on company strategy and aligned each product manager with a particular director.
It always takes some time after new team members come in to ensure that teams are working effectively together.”
Looking forward, at what point does the current structure break down at scale? And what comes next?
After our next few hires, we’ll see how our communication and coordination works between teams. It always takes some time after new team members come in to ensure that teams are working effectively together, and sometimes it takes a few attempts to get this right. And as the business needs grow, we’ll continue to add in new PMs to scale our existing products or to focus on new areas of growth.
