How To Build A Product Team For Your Business
Creating exceptional products that not only fulfil customer needs but also consistently exceed their expectations is critical for businesses. With exceptional competition in the current landscape, businesses must constantly innovate and adapt to stay ahead of the curve, ensuring their products and services remain relevant and desirable to the target audience.
One key component that sets businesses apart from the competition is a strong product team! When businesses build a strong product team with talented and motivated individuals, they lay the foundation for developing products that customers want to pay for. With a great product team, businesses can ideate, design, and deliver products that cater to the ever-changing demands of the market.
However, building the right product team with skilled individuals who possess the expertise, creativity, and passion necessary to drive product innovation and excellence can be extremely challenging for businesses..
Here’s how you can build a strong product team for your business!
Table Of Contents
What Is A Product Team?
Why Your Business Needs A Strong Product Team
By investing in a strong product team, companies can not only improve their product development processes but also foster a culture of collaboration, experimentation, and continuous improvement that can help them achieve long-term success
Still need convincing? Here are some reasons why your business needs a product team.
Driving Product Vision
A strong product team can help to drive the product vision and strategy, develop product roadmaps that guide product development and launch efforts and build products that align with the company's business objectives.
Enhancing Innovation
Product teams help to enhance innovation by developing new and creative ideas for products that meet customer needs and differentiate the company from its competitors.
Ensuring High Product Quality
Product quality is paramount, and a strong product team can ensure that the products developed meet high standards of quality and performance before and after launch.
Adapting To Market Changes
Adapt to changes in the market and respond to emerging trends and customer needs with a product team that monitors market trends and customer feedback to make adjustments to product development as needed.
Report on Marketing
Trends 2023
The report features insights from top Wizly professionals to help your business growth
How To Create A Product Development Strategy
Creating and executing an efficient product development strategy is essential for any business to guide their team through the process of bringing new products or enhancements to market. A well-defined strategy will ensure alignment with your company's objectives, help prioritise resources, and provide a roadmap for achieving your goals.Here’s what an ideal product development strategy looks like
Ideation and Conceptualization: To execute the first step in the product development process, The product team can identify new product opportunities or improvements to existing products. Product growth professionals can analyze market trends, conduct user research, and gather insights from customers, competitors, and internal stakeholders for product development and upgrades.
Product Development Strategy and Roadmap: Once a product idea is finalized, the team develops a product development strategy that outlines the vision, goals, and key milestones for the project. This strategy acts as a blueprint for the entire product lifecycle, guiding the team's efforts and ensuring alignment with the company's broader objectives.
Design and Product Development: With a product development strategy, the product team works closely with designers and developers to create wireframes, mockups, and prototypes for the product. This process also involves user testing, feedback incorporation, and continuous refinement to ensure the final product meets user expectations.
Product Launch and Go-to-Market: As the product development process reaches its final stages, the team coordinates with marketing, sales, and customer support teams to plan and execute a successful product launch.
Performance Monitoring and Iteration: After the product is launched, the product team closely monitors its performance, gathering user feedback, and analyzing key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge its success and make amends for improvements.
What Is The Best Product Team Structure?
There are many reasons as to why startups fail. Some of the top reasons include running out of cash, building a product no one needs, pricing issues, and inability to fight the competition. However, another big reasons why startups fail is building a weak team to run the business. Now, it is not just about the product team, but the overall team that a startup builds. But for product-led startups, the product team is the team they need to build cautiously.
Without the best product team structure, many teams cannot build the best product for the market, resulting in subpar growth. While some businesses can bounce back, having an inefficient product team structure often resultsin failure. For any business, it is critical to understand the key roles in a product team, and how they can use these toles to build the best product team structure.
Essential Roles In A Product Team
If you are building a product team for your business, there is quite a journey ahead. It is never about hiring as many people as you can and expecting something to click, building a team requires careful thought. Before you build a product team though, it is critical to understand the key roles that your team members can take up. Here are some of the essential roles in a product team for businesses of different sizes:
Product Manager: A product manager is responsible for defining product vision, strategy, and roadmap, ensuring product development aligns with user needs and business goals
Product Developer: The product developer develops and maintains the product's codebase, ensuring efficient, scalable, and reliable functionality
Product Designer: The product designer designs user experiences and interfaces, ensuring products are visually appealing, user-friendly, and accessible
Technical Writer: The technical writer creates and maintains product documentation, ensuring users have clear, concise, and accurate information to effectively use the product
Product Markerter: The product marketer develops and executes marketing strategies, positioning the product in the market, and driving user acquisition, engagement, and retention
VP Of Product: The VP of Product is a senior executive responsible for defining the product vision and strategy, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and ensure that products align with business goals and user needs. In short, they are responsible for overseeing the entire product management process within an organization or product line
Chief Product Officer (CPO): The CPO is responsible for leading cross-functional teams to ensure successful product development, launch, and growth while overseeing the overall product strategy and development within an organization
While these are the traditional roles in a product team, the ideal product team for any business will depend on their business needs and budget. Even though there is no hard and fast rule regarding the best product team structure for businesses, here are some examples that can help companies build one.
Product Team Structure For Small Companies
While building a product team for a small business, it is important to not make the product team too big. Small product teams often have a few members including a developer, designer, and marketer to manage the development, launch, and optimization of a product. While this is ideal for a small company, on-demand talent can be utilized for time-sensitive projects or challenges without hiring full-time employees.
Product Team Structure For Medium-Sized Companies
As the company grows, the product line also increases. Therefore, it is vital to include multiple specialists in the product team structure who can help in specific areas. With individual product managers leading their specific teams, medium-sized companies can build a line of products for their customers. Product teams in medium-sized companies often share marketing and content resources or outsource the tasks to a marketing agency or on-demand talent to access the required expertise.
Product Team Structure For Large Companies
When a company is extremely large, it has an extensive in-house product team. The product team features multiple teams working in tandem to build a suite of products, managed by different VPs. While the company has enough members to run the product team, they often leverage on-demand talent to solve specific product challenges.
Where Do Product Teams Need Help
Identifying Customer Needs
Product teams often need help in developing user personas and creating customer journey maps to inform product development decisions
Market Research
To make products better and fit for the market, teams need assistance in identifying key market segments, evaluating competitors, and developing pricing strategies
Product Validation
Product teams need help in validating product concepts and features, which is crucial for ensuring that the product is viable in the market
Hiring And Resource Allocation
Product teams often need help in finding and hiring the right talent to fill skill gaps within the organization and allocating resources effectively
How To Build A Strong Product Team
When building the best product team for your business, it is important to understand that the team should consist of individuals that know their OKRs extremely well. As we stated above, there is no one size fits all product team structure, and it is important to change as you grow. Here are some tips on how to build a strong product team.
Foster A Culture Of Collaboration: Encourage open communication, establish effective channels of communication, and promote a culture of transparency and openness. This drives innovation and motivates the team to share new ideas and drive growth.
Keep The Team Small: While building large product teams looks like the right choice for large companies, more members can create longer feedback loops and unnecessary bureaucracy. Therefore, leading a small product team powered by on-demand talent can help businesses grow extremely fast.
Understand Your Customer: Understanding your customer is crucial for developing products that make a big impact in the target market. By hiring individuals that can execute customer research, create user personas, and use customer feedback, businesses can create a strong product team.
Take Advantage Of On-Demand Talent: There are professionals around the world that have been subjected to the challenges your company might be facing. Therefore, accessing on-demand talent for specific challenges can help businesses get professional expertise that may not be available locally.
Why Small Teams Powered By Growth Professionals Are A Success
Hiring independent growth professionals can help businesses of all shapes and sizes to catalyze growth without building a large in-house team.
Build Your Dream Team With On-Demand Wizly Proffesionals
Build Your Dream Team With On-Demand Wizly Professionals
Whether you are looking for that one missing piece or trying to build a whole product team, Wizly’s global network of professionals can help you accelerate growth. Move over freelance marketplaces and build your in-house team with Wizly!
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Wizly’s global pool of professionals is spread across 25 countries, and the average Wizly professional has 12+ years of highly relevant experience.
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Case Studies
How To Get Started With Wizly
With Wizly, businesses can start building their product team in minutes. Connect with professionals, ask questions, and post opportunities in just a few clicks! Here’s a quick rundown of how what you can do on Wizly:
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Top Product Experts For Your Business
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Some of the top companies that our growth professionals work with
How Wizly helps companies of all shapes and sizes
Wizly For Small-Scale Companies
When an early-stage company is growing, budgets are tight and resources are limited. Building a strong product team with highly skilled and experienced professionals can become an impossible task. With Wizly’s global pool of on-demand talent, companies can build exceptional product teams without spending substantial time and capital. Here are some ways small-scale companies can use Wizly for their product team.
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Wizly For Medium-Scale Companies
Even though many medium-scale companies have a product team in place, they lack the expertise needed to catalyze growth and scale fast. By utilizing on-demand talent for specific projects and challenges, these companies can achieve business goals quicker. Here are some ways medium-scale companies can use Wizly for their product team.
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Wizly For Large-Scale Companies
Even though large-scale companies often have an extensive in-house product team, utilising on-demand talent can help them solve specific business challenges that a professional may have already solved. Here are some ways large-scale companies can use Wizly for their product team.
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FAQs
Wizly is an invite-only growth as a service (GaaS) marketplace connecting businesses with a network of global professionals. With a suite of tools and services designed to streamline the process of finding and working with growth professionals, companies can build elite teams from the pool of experts to catalyze their growth.
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Wizly offers a collection of tools for businesses to connect with professionals. Businesses can directly connect with a professional through messages or booking a call. If you are unsure about which professional you want to work with, you can post an opportunity highlighting all your requirements, and the professionals will reach out to you with their proposals.
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