Episode 135: Answering Questions About Structuring Product Management Teams and Pivoting from Sales to Product-Led Growth

In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa Perri answers subscribers’ questions about structuring product management teams for complicated portfolios such as medical devices and having software digital products, moving from sales-led to product-led, and capacity planning for teams.

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Q&A:

Q: So this one is about MedTech. How do you set up the teams for product management?
A: When you're working in a complex portfolio, like something that has hardware and software, we do have different life cycles in those products, and the way they get built as well is going to be very different. For example, with a hardware product, we're not going to be using the same type of experimentation techniques we might be using in a software product. But when we think about integrating these things, I think there are a couple of different factors you want to think about when structuring your product management team. Do you have stand-alone applications versus devices?
Q: What approach would you take if a company is prioritizing business problems over customer problems?
A: This is a really common scenario. Lots of companies out there are sales-led. When you start to introduce software components as we have in the last twenty years in these modern companies, that starts to change because our avenues for growth are not just about, hey, let me go sell this or sell the hell out of this, right, or let me go do the best marketing campaign in the world. It's also about things like product-led growth, people discovering the products, getting in there, unlocking new features, and being able to upsell them in those ways as well. So let's think about how we get people to move from sales led to a product-led one.
Q: Dear Melissa, we have quite a large application that is a mixture of EAM, ERP, and CMMS even more. This used to be a service company that evolved into a product company. Or so they say it did. Anyway, there are now six people managing the application, and I was asked to lead that team. I have a question about the product structure at this time. The structure is based on how we sell it, but the workload is wrong. Some of the products are new and have less work, and others are old and very big with about 1400 workflows, and they have one PM. So, how do you structure your team around this to make for a successful story?
A: Here is the thing. We do not structure teams around how we sell things. Instead, we structure them around strategy and around our products. It's a little combination of both. We want to make sure that we have enough coverage over different things, But we also want to make sure that we are prioritizing the stuff that needs the most work to reach our goals.

Resources:

Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter

MelissaPerri.com | CPO Accelerator

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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