Many companies have recently introduced product management, yet their product teams often fail. Why is this?

First, as a business owner or board member, you must enforce proper product management from the start. If you don’t, it will never become effective. Companies typically take several approaches when implementing product management, but these often fail in the long run. Here’s why these approaches fall short and why a fundamental change in strategy is necessary.

First, development teams in smaller companies are often not organized into Scrum teams at all. When you implement frameworks like Scrum, LeSS, or SAFe, you need at least one product representative. This representative communicates product changes and goals between upper management and the development teams.

Now, we come to the first solution, which is to try and find a senior developer you already trust and promote them to Product Owner. I completely understand why you might consider this a good idea because the person is probably someone who is well aligned with your vision, understands future tasks, and gets along with fellow developers. However, the risk that you have is that such people could hinder your future projects or tend to work less than before. Being part of decision-making in the business, they could try to avoid work that a real Product Owner would perhaps push to have done. Finally, they could also ruin their relationship with colleagues because of the promotion. As you can see, the risks are numerous and you might want to avoid all those situations that usually happen at some point.

Next solution could be getting on the bandwagon people who are juniors and possibly outside of the industry just to save money. Not knowing the industry is fine – everything can be learned. Being a junior is fine – but not in a setup where you need to lead and without a mentor. Think twice: Are you saving any money if you need to spend a lot of time and money to get such people up to an acceptable level? Also, think about development teams having an inexperienced guy handling their tickets and business goals?! It would disrupt them as well and create a feeling of insecurity about the company vision or future development.

The last one I want to talk about is also the worst one because it will make your company a train station with people coming and leaving all the time. Unless you want this, but I clearly doubt it. I am talking about getting proper product people but not letting them do the work as they should, but making them backlog admins. It’s the least wanted situation even for the junior product professionals because they cannot learn much if anything and experienced guys can only get bored and uninspired which always results in them wanting to leave. Will the product team work then? Most certainly not!

So, how can you make your product teams effective? Implement product teams correctly and fill key roles with experienced professionals. Juniors are fine occasionally, as long as they can learn from seniors and develop their skills. Don’t hesitate to invest in people – such environments retain talent. Remember, their growth is your growth!

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