While planning any vacation, you choose the destination and the accommodations and outline the itinerary as per your budget and time. The same concept applies when you are designing the product roadmap, keeping the company goals in mind. To ensure success, the core attributes of a product team need to be aligned. The more the company grows, the higher are the chances for misalignment. Failure to align strategy, design, and engineering results in failure to identify and solve problems or make decisions to get work done. False starts, delays, and errors in executing their vision.

Importance of Aligning Product Team

A good product roadmap will aim in fulfilling the company’s mission statement. For example, a successful roadmap will consider user interaction and how the product helps the user, regardless of their geographic area. Because the vision of the company may evolve over time as it grows, it is important to keep the product flexible to any future developments or upgrades to stay aligned to company strategy shifts.

Tips To Align Product Strategy With Company Goals

After understanding company strategy, it is essential to take steps to create and manage the alignment. Working within a defined structure assures that your product satisfies its purpose while not stepping out of the scope of the company’s strategies. 

  • Research and find goals: Review recent company-wide presentations, board meeting recaps, etc. Company-wide strategies and goals must have been communicated to investors and stakeholders. The same goals will be enquired about during the next meeting.
  • Analyze statistics: Look at the areas the company is spending and earning money. The revenue objectives that are considered will give you an idea of the company’s priorities. 
  • Share your vision: If a clear roadmap does not exist in certain areas, then the product team has the opportunity to shape it from the very beginning.

 

Product Team Operating Model

  1. Identify the problem: Figuring out what the issue your team is facing can help to focus and better address the problem you aim to solve with your Model. Pinpointing the difficulties can serve as a guide for your Model.
  2. measuring Success: Your goals should be solving the problems previously identified. The success of the solution implemented should be of a quantifiable measure. That is, you should be able to measure the success in terms of quantity whether it is as the percentage of increase in sales or decrease in shipping time to deliver products faster.
  3. Team Principles: Principles are handy to set the tone for the working of the entire team. Whenever a team is at crossroads over a decision, they can rely on the predefined principles to act as a framework for the decision-making process. Focusing on the principles can guide the team to achieve the goals faster. 
  4. Development Process: Keep track of your progress by documenting the process at each phase. It gives a clear vision of your goals and the efforts undertaken to achieve them without getting lost in the finer details.
  5. Workflow: This overview describes how much work you intake into the system, the benchmarks you use to prioritize your work, the cost including time and money on each item, tracking the status of each phase, and the measure used to evaluate progress.
  6. Activities: List your team activities, when they occur, the people responsible for them, and the expected outcome of each activity. 
  7. Decision Making: Capture the details of at least the major decision-making processes. What the decision is, who makes it and how, how to work around disagreements and reach a consensus. Who is responsible for managing discord and when and the different ways in which each decision is documented.
  8. Communication: Cataloging the channels used for communication can give an idea of how to approach different situations based on their relevance. Emails for conversations that require documentation, instant messaging for quick responses, and direct calls for emergencies.

 

What Happens When You Have Poor Team Alignment?

Misalignment of the product team can result in an absolute waste of resources and a result that does not fulfill its purpose in terms of company goals. The longer the misalignment exists, the harder it is to get back on track. The product team needs to constantly tune on the direction they move. Each member has their own vision of where the team must be moving towards and it is essential to maintain excellent communication. Many unforeseen challenges may occur but, with the right steps, you can maneuver around them by trusting each other. You can anticipate potential hurdles by having a diverse team.

Conclusion

Each team member should have the right skills to offer and contribute to the team. The members should have the skillset to fulfill the core attributes of the product team. Always keep the customer’s needs in mind. There has to be a need and market for your product for it to be successful. Maintaining a customer-centric mindset will undoubtedly help you stay on track. The current state and future state diagram can help visualize your potential plans for the product. Incorporating long-term goals can also support company goals as the business scales higher.