Product Team Kernel

The smallest group of caring, empowered, competent people who trust each other and are driven by a common mission is what I call the Product Team Kernel.

What combination of people make up an ideal product team? Who knows. There is no generic formula. It depends on the tasks at hand, the business context it operates in and the resources available. Even with that clarified there are many possible combinations that could work. Or fail.

The same group needs to be able to come up with a solution to the problem too. This solution must not only address the customer’s problem within the constraints of the business. The solution also needs to be understood and usable by the customer. Above that, the team needs to be able to deliver the solution.

These 3-ish people form the product team kernel.

Wouldn’t a solution benefit from more brains? What about the marketing input? Sales, success and support have great ideas too. And data-scientists. Definitely data-scientists.

Maybe.

In some situations (like when you are actually in a ML-product team) other capabilities can be helpful, even necessary. Usually they are not part of the kernel. The main reason for the kernel of the team to be as small as possible is two-fold:

In this context I am referring to the speed of learning (and especially not the velocity at which development teams deliver features). Great teams understand that it matters far more to build the right things, than to build many things. Every shipped item has costs (maintenance, support, dependencies etc.). These costs compound over time and take away capacity of a team, as it faces an increasing amount of “keep the lights on” work.

There are only three ways to deal with this inherent decay of team capacity:

(1) split the team/add resources,

(2) kill features that don’t work,

(3) ship more impactful features.

The latter being the most effective way of dealing with the challenge, a team needs to optimise for finding the most impactful solutions to the customers problems. With the vast amount of unknowns in this kind of process, the team must optimise for learning. Its main task — given any problem — is to reduce uncertainty.

While each member of the product team kernel brings their expertise to the table, there are a few traits that all of them should have:

An effective product team has a kernel of as few people necessary tasked with reducing uncertainty about the problem, so they can find the most impactful solution fast. This product team kernel requires high trust among members, expertise in their respective fields, and an outcome-driven, customer-focused, resourceful attitude.

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